ABSTRACT
When consulting the rapidly increasing number of critical studies dedicated to Umberto Eco, one is tempted to suspect the existence of a secret, ongoing competition among commentators as to who will produce the most elegant and elaborate paraphrase of Eco’s manifold interests.1 Eco’s own admiration for Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia seems to have affected profoundly those who exalt his intellectual achievements in ever more intricate and baffling lists.2 With a mixture of benevolent irony and admiration Eco’s work has recently been described as an ‘information superhighway’, an immense hypertext connecting a seemingly infinite range of often widely different topics.3 Yet, while the scope and heterogeneity of Eco’s concerns clearly justifies enthusiastic praise, it also threatens to impede an adequate critical assessment of the works themselves. Many of Eco’s critics, it seems, are more interested in elucidating the relationship between different parts of his vast production than in discussing his works within a wider context. Frequently, this leads scholars to view the totality of Eco’s texts as a self-referential cultural universe, his theoretical and historical studies thus
becoming handy tools for the interpretation of his fictional writings, which in turn are viewed as an exemplification of his theoretical positions. As a consequence, it becomes difficult both to illustrate the relative strengths and shortcomings of Eco’s work in comparison with that of other scholars working in the same fields and to outline those aspects of his research, which, although present in many of his texts, are not explicitly at the centre of any of them. This is particularly evident when it comes to studying Eco’s concern with analytic philosophy of language.
