The Role of the Reader: Remembering the Possible Worlds of Umberto Eco

Abstract

This chapter reads Umberto Eco’s two novels, The Name of the Rose and Foucauld’s Pendulum, from the perspective of edusemiotics and presents a fictional text as a densely articulated semiotic teaching device. Eco’s philosophical legacy is singled out here in terms of his attention to the production of possible worlds by the reader . These works present an educative vision of some basic semiotic principles that infuse the textual form of a popular fictional genre : the detective story. Eco’s ‘labyrinth’ metaphor refers to the open structure of the multiple narrative levels in the detective novel, a special characteristic of which is the seemingly arbitrary connection of signs. The semiotic twists and turns of the detective story facilitate the educational function in accord with edusemiotics . The reader thus is a detective constructing multiple possible worlds where meaning is beyond the material realm of the given text and totally in the metaphysical realm of the possible world of the reader’s mind. The aesthetics of textual production is generated through the lexical signs and codes. The detective genre enables Eco to produce an educational narrative via the intricacies of plot in the story while teaching main aspects of semiotic theory. The inevitable transformation of the reader into an individual capable of appreciating and grasping the conflicting ideological viewpoints expressed through the dialogical structure of the text accords with the edusemiotic framework.