Umberto Eco's career as a writer, scholar and philosopher reflects a lifelong engagement with the writings of James Joyce. Eco's encounters with Joyce in his “pre-semiotic” phase were both critical and creative, occasional as well as substantial. Eco also made very specific semiotic uses of Joyce. Early in his career, Eco examined Joyce in an important essay that formed part of the original Italian edition of his Open Work: Form and Indeterminancy in Contemporary Poetics (1962), now entitled in English as The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce (1989). The young Eco found aspects of Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus congenial, but the interaction of medievalism and modernism in the mature Joyce constitutes a model to which Eco constantly returns. Indeed, the patterning of cultural history discernible in Eco's first three novels, foreshadowed in his reading of Joyce's medievalism, lends a character of hesitancy to the history that is narrated there.

1954–68: CRITIAL AND CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS WITH JOYCE

Eco worked on Joyce during the 1950s. There are allusions to the Irish writer in his degree thesis of 1954 on Saint Thomas Aquinas (first published in 1956 in Italian, revised in 1970, and now available in English as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas [1988]). Eco's principal points of reference in his thesis – understandably, in view of his focus on Thomas Aquinas – were the abandoned autobiographical novel Stephen Hero and its successor, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Their use is evidence of Eco's interest in the Thomist, and more generally Aristotelian, foundations of Joyce's poetics.