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 recog-
nizable semiotic approach, based on the category of interpretation, but at the
same time he has not closed his research and training space around an ortho-
doxy. 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, char-
acterized 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.