ABSTRACT
Reading Eco's The Name of the Rose becomes interesting because of the way in which it stages the textuality and mtertextuality of the apparently vacuous "I love you," a phrase which comes to stand as characteristic of the entire problematic of postmodermty for Eco. The Name of the Rose opens with the story of both a lost manuscript and lost traveling companion - a double tale of lost love. This chapter retells the story of the missing manuscript and the missing companion because there are a number of subtle problems embedded within it that relate to the discussion of gender and genre (how to say "I love you") in the postmodern romance. It argues that Eco's novel uses this break with generic convention and relies upon the indeterminacy of gender first to displace romance's traditional, heterosexist love interest between a male narrator and a female beloved, and then to replaces it with a romance between the narrator and his manuscript.
