Bologna: a Semiotic Center

Abstract

Thanks to the presence of Umberto Eco, the University of Bologna has been the place of institutionalization, training and debate on semiotics as a discipline since the early 1970s. Over the years, Eco has defined a very recognizable semiotic approach, based on the category of  interpretation, but at the same time he has not closed his research and training space around an orthodoxy. For this reason, more than a real “school” (like the école de Paris), he has created a center – of diffusion, training, elaboration – of semiotic thought, characterized by a common approach but also constitutively open to differences, including the achievements of the philosophy of language, cognitivism, history of philosophy, media studies, cultural and translation studies, rhetoric… This opening of Echian semiotics is not merely a coincidence, or an event due to the times; it is requested by and shared with the core of Echian semiotic theory, which places the category of negotiation and translation at the center, in order to question the limits of Sense.