Umberto Eco was born in 1932. He is a contemporary semiotician, medievalist, and novelist of Italian descent.
The subject matter of his work on semiotics ranges from high-tech and theoretical issues to analyzes of comics such as Superman and Krazy Kat.
His typical playfulness is revealed in one of his definitions of semiotics:
This discipline “deals with everything that could be taken as a sign” – anything that can be a substitute for something else. “This thing does not necessarily exist … Thus semiotics is, in principle, a discipline that examines everything that could be used to lie” (1976: 77).
In a 1986 interview, Eco acknowledged that “every single thing I have done comes down to one thing: a persistent effort to understand the mechanism by which we give meaning to the world around us” (Sullivan 1986, 46; cited in Noth 1990, 326).
