E

Dall’albero al labirinto: Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione (2007).

A student of philosophy and aesthetics under the guidance of L. Pareyson at the University of Turin, Eco’s initial concerns with the production of signs and communication can be traced to his studies on media and popular culture in the early 1960s. His readings of Charles S. Peirce and Charles Morris, his collaboration with the eminent semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok and his enthusiasm for Lotman’s sociosemiotics fuelled his new concerns with Barthes’ chains of signifiers, Peircean triadic relations between sign (representamen), interpretant and object, encyclopedia, paradigmatic structures, mechanisms of abduction, and the universe of intertextuality. This distancing from Saussurean semiology, Claude LéviStrauss’ ontological structuralism (see in The Open Work, ‘Series and Structure’) and, in general, from binary relations between signifier and signified, or between sign, code and dictionary semantics, leads Eco to embrace the notion of a theoretically infinite semiosic process of interpretation of signs and texts.