A philosophy that boasts the supreme ignorance of our language sounded sexy at one point now it’s become overshadowed by an emphasis on traditional storytelling. The analogy is meant to sound portentous for it is likely that less and less gravity will be placed upon our relationship to the symbol. A semiotician might say, depending on your geography and professors, that we are all slaves to symbols-no more able to escape them then we are able to sprout wings and fly to Mars. Suffice to say that these are a few of the fellows responsible for muddling up language and turning the server/served dynamic upside-down. However, it is for his work within the field of semiotics (analysis of symbols is a poor definition) that he has conducted the majority of his academics, continuing the work of the previous philosophers Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, and Vyacheslav Ivanov.Įven if you’re an English major, these names may not ring a bell. Novelist, theoretical philosopher, structural linguist, Eco is every inch the intellectual prima donna, or if you prefer, an older generation’s answer to James Franco.

This is paraphrasing Anthony Burgess, but I only do so because I couldn’t have put it better myself. Now that it’s here to stay, why bother any more with it than we have to?Īfter much deliberation, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Umberto Eco’s 1980 debut novel “The Name Of The Rose.” Eco’s a true polymath in the sense that he knows far too much for any one man. We’d prefer to think against the judgment of thousands of years of philosophical discourse and say that one day, language simply precipitated from the sky.

Gertrude Stein might just have easily said that word is a word is a word. What’s in a name, anyway? Or for that matter, what’s in a word? Most of us probably don’t care. There’s a fairly good chance that for the majority of us, these lines have been read, essayed about, or playacted at least once, provided we read our required Shakespeare in high school. “Tis but thy name that is my enemy…/What’s in a name?”

Umberto author of the name of the rose