Intertextuality in Umberto Eco's Work

Intertextuality in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose (1983 is a historical murder mystery set in a 14th century monastery. This paper attempts to study Eco’s use of intertextuality throughout the novel. The story of this novel cannot be seen apart from their codes. Codes are the keys which unlock the signs of a text, Eco mentions that “A book is made of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speaks of things” (393). This novel utilises the method of intertextuality, as a study of mental, emotional and spiritual discovery, and the complexity of facing such discoveries in the ultimate realisation that stories are always being retold. "Eco has repeatedly underlined in interviews, talks, articles and especially in his postscript to the Rose(1984), that his narrative is myriad of meta fictional indicators and of intertextual traces of many authors" (Capozzi 416)

Intertextuality is a term coined by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in 1960s. Kristeva, in her essay Word, Dialogue and Novel, defines intertextuality as "a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double" (Martin 1). It is also a way of accounting for the role of literary materials without recourse to traditional notions of authorship. Roland Barthes built his theory of text and intertextuality based on the works of Kristeva and Bakhtin. Barthes' theory of text in his essay Theory of the Text, involves “the theory of intertextuality because the text offers a multiple meanings and is also interlaced out of numerous already existing texts” (Simandan).

Umberto Eco describes two specific readership that he expected to read his book; closed readers, and open readers. Closed readers would be naive in their perception, being aware of the intertextuality of the book, but disinterested in further research, choosing...