Umberto Eco’s Semiotics Umberto Eco’s Semiotics : Theory, Methodology and Poetics By Bujar Hoxha Umberto Eco’s Semiotics: Theory, Methodology and Poetics By Bujar Hoxha This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Bujar Hoxha All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-7746-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-7746-6 On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory by Algirdas Julien Greimas. Copyright © 1987 by Les Editions du Seuil. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt Inc., for Les Editions de Minuit. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume I-II, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1931, 1932, 1959, 1960 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Open Work by Umberto Eco, translated by Anna Cancogni, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright ©1989 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by Umberto Eco, translated by Anna Cancogni, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright ©1994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. To my “teacher” of semiotics: Eero Tarasti TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One .............................................................................................. 19 The narrative process as Eco’s theoretical challenge Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 48 Textual Strategies in Eco’s Semiotic Comprehension Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 71 Eco’s theoretical contribution to the communication processes: the “semiotics proper” perspective Chapter Four ........................................................................................... 108 Eco’s Revolutionary Pedagogics: The poetics of an open work Index ....................................................................................................... 141 INTRODUCTION Umberto Eco has made an enormous contribution to communication sciences, philosophy, and other related disciplines. His multiple discussable scientific contexts (either from the scholarly, narrative or artistic viewpoints) get more complex to define if matters treated are elaborated on simultaneously, out of their multi-and interdisciplinary context. One of the methodologically significant issues to discuss in this respect is his interdisciplinarity, which contributes to the overall cohesive treatment of the semiotic method and renders the reader conscious of the clarity and reliability of the theoretical paradigms and approaches to semiotics that he discusses. My task in this book is to render the semiotic approaches visible, analysable, and applicable in the shape as they are used in some of Eco’s theoretical works, which I intend to analyse to emphasise the component of poetics. Specifically speaking, I shall focus on his following four works: Six Walks in the Fictional Woods [see: (Eco 1994a; 1994b)] and The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts [see: (Eco 1979; 1984)], in the first two chapters of the present book, as well as Theory of Semiotics [see: (Eco 1975; 1976)] and The Open Work [see: ( Eco 1962; 1989)], in the last two chapters of the present text. My aim in this book is to provide a determined theoretical “formula,” in the metaphorical sense of the word, which would unite all mentioned components for the sake of the “openness” of a work of art. This book shall therefore attempt to present some of Eco’s theoretical paradigms, which principally pertain to structural and interpretative semiotics, and provide for a comprehensive semiotic theory, which not only would assist academics and scholars but, it is hoped, be an integral part of the professional literature for students of communication sciences and semiotics. A significant part of the philosophical production of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries [such as, for instance, in: (Peirce 1960)] can provide firm arguments concerning Eco’s knowledge of cognitive processes as well as semiotic processes taken from the theoretical point of view [such as is,