Ten years after Umberto Eco's death, this series offers a journey through the work of one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century. A philosopher, semiotician, novelist, and essayist, Eco understood culture as a vast network of connections encompassing literature, film, philosophy, television, comics, and popular culture.

For decades he developed a solid body of theoretical work to understand how we construct meaning and how we interpret the world. However, there came a point when the essay was no longer enough for him. As he himself wrote: "Where one cannot theorize, one must narrate"His novels are born precisely from that need: to turn fiction into a space where the great questions of semiotics can be tested.

Over four sessions we will explore his seven novels to discover how they interact with his major essays and understand why works like The Name of the Rose, Foucault's pendulum o The mysterious flame of Queen Loana They remain fundamental for thinking about current issues such as truth, memory, conspiracy, or the construction of knowledge.

More than a course on literature, this series proposes an entry point to the thought of Umberto Eco through one of his most fertile territories: fiction.

Program

Tuesday, October 20. From Saint ThomasáSuperman.

We begin our journey in the formative years of a young Eco, an insatiable thinker who, while working in television, both fascinated and infuriated academia. We will see how reading Roman O. Jakobson and Charles S. Peirce opened the doors of semiotics for him. Armed with this new theoretical compass, we will discover how he managed to break down the walls between “high” and “low” culture, analyzing medieval aesthetics, the avant-garde, and comics with equal passion. We will also see how, before establishing himself as a novelist, he was already experimenting with literary play through irony and parody, demonstrating that intellectual rigor should never be at odds with a sense of humor. This period would, in essence, sow the seeds of his future leap into fiction decades later.

• Visions of Eco's work: the semiologist versus the literary man (Anna Maria Lorusso) vs. the convergence of domains (Claudio Paolucci).
• The young Eco: academic training, Saint Thomas Aquinas, RAI and mass culture.
• Joyce Effect: His analyses of avant-garde art.
• First literary exercises: from pastiche in Daily mínimo.

Wednesday, October 21. Mystery in the abbotwent: el fenóless than The Name of the Rose.

In 1980, the publishing world watched with surprise as an already famous academic ventured into the field with an unusual thriller Medieval. We will delve into the dark corridors of that abbey to understand how and why Eco decided that fiction was the ideal vehicle to explain what theory could not. We will analyze the key elements of a work that functions simultaneously as a detective story, a semi-philosophical essay, and a hall of mirrors capable of transforming the reader into an active accomplice; the perfect materialization of some ideas that the author had cultivated for years in his previous theoretical works.

• The leap into fiction: why does a semiotician decide to write a novel?
• An ontology of fiction.
• Back to the Middle Ages.
• Analysis of The Name of the Rose: the novel as pastiche and its relationship with the neo-baroque aesthetic.

Tuesday, October 27. The power of falsehood: secret societies, paranoia, and conspiracies.

If there was one thing that fascinated Umberto Eco, it was lies and their incredible capacity to shape history. In this session, we will explore the theme of conspiratorial visions through novels such as The péFoucault node, baudolino, The Prague cemetery y Number zeroWe will discover how Eco dissected that human need to seek hidden connections and conspiracies where only chaos is perceived. By delving into his “conspiracy laboratory,” we will see how he anticipated the risks of interpretive paranoia, drawing on his celebrated essay. The LíMyths of interpretationn (1990), we will explore that fragile border that separates rational thought from the trap hidden by hermetic knowledge.

• The semiotics of lying.
• Eco's interest in the fake and its ability to generate real historical events.
• Hermetic reasoning and interpretive paranoia.
• The literary laboratory of conspiracy: analysis of The péFoucault node, baudolino, The Prague cemetery y NakedZero.

Wednesday, October 28. Language and memory.

Our journey concludes by exploring the cornerstone of culture: memory. In particular, through novels. The island of the dífrom before y The mysterious flame of Queen LoanaWe will delve deeper into his concept of collective memory. For Eco, remembering is like entering an immense encyclopedia where truth and falsehood, history and legend coexist. We will conclude the cycle by evaluating his monumental legacy ten years after his passing, highlighting the coherence of a career built on semiotics, the discipline that taught us to understand the underlying logic of our life in society.

• The search for identity and meaning in The island of the dífrom before and in The mysterious flame of Queen Loana.
• Theoretical links: the relationship of these novels with La búsearch for the perfect language y Kant and the platypus.
• Conclusion: Eco's relevance ten years later

Taught by

Rayco González is a researcher and popularizer specializing in cultural theory, literature, and semiotics. In this series, he proposes a cross-disciplinary reading of Umberto Eco's work, placing his essays and novels in dialogue to make his thought accessible to readers of all levels.

Who may be interested

This course is for people interested in literature, philosophy, cultural theory, the history of ideas, and contemporary thought. Prior reading of Umberto Eco's work is not required: the course provides the necessary tools to discover or revisit it from a new perspective.

Information and registration

To register, write to workshops@circulobellasartes.com indicating the workshop name what you want to do

If you need more information, you can contact us at workshops@circulobellasartes.com or 600 711 242.