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The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Hutchinson university library)

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The Italian Umberto Eco is a literary critic, novelist, and semiotician (studying symbols and symbol systems).

His introductory work to this fascinating field is "Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language" which is easier to start with. In "Theory of Semiotics" he presents his views. In his novel "The Name of the Rose" (1980) he brings the study of semiotics to fiction.

In this book, Eco sets out to illustrate how the reader engages in constructing meaning when reading texts. Like Roland Barthes and others in the field of semiotics (which is the study of symbols in culture), Eco draws upon Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics) and Claude Levi-Strauss (Structural Anthropology). Yet Eco recognizes that meaning is not merely governed by structure, but also interactively constructed by the reader/interpreter, who often inserts or fills-in missing meaning to construct a coherent picture.

Readers interested in questions of meaning, the philosophy of language, signs and symbols will find this a fascinating work. Although the subject matter is challenging, Eco's style is clear - he is a masterful writer.

Eco's book is an important contribution in the part of semiotics, that explore how meaning is a product of the relation between reader and text. The most important issue is, that 'reader' as well as 'the way the text invite to be read', is already positions in the text. This is not new in the exploring of utterance, but the implications are still not only relevant but important. Eco's book is well-written and, in a didactic view, a proper way of introducing complex semiotic theory to students at university level.