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From Rocco Capozzi’s Preface in Reading Eco>

“Whenever students ask me to give them an idea of what Umberto Eco is ‘really’ like, in person, I often follow their inquiry with my own question: What do Augustine, R. Bacon, T. Aquinas, Templars, Baroque, TV serials like ‘Colombo,’ movies like ‘Casablanca’ and the trilogy of ‘Indiana Jones’; thinkers like Peirce, Bakhtin, Derrida, Foucault, Popper, and Wittengstein; writers like Dante, Poe, Joyce, Borges, Barthes, Lotman; as well as aesthetics, philosophy, structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, mass media, Superman, Conan Doyle, esoteric texts, kabbalah, irony, humor, intertextuality, reading the classics, philosophy, comic strips, computers, techniques of writing, and interpreting signs/texts, architecture, libraries, labyrinths, palimpsests, the art of writing bestsellers, ‘global encyclopedia,’ ‘inferential walks,’ ‘open works,’ and ‘model readers,’ have in common? After a few seconds of silence I end up explaining that this is a partial list of authors, topics, theories, and issues that Eco can examine, discuss and joke about, with various degrees of authority”