Umberto Eco - Foucaut's Pendulum

[Linda Minor]

Let's not overlook Eco's co-authorship of The Bond Affair.

How can one overlook something one did not know to look for? At any rate, I did look up The Bond Affair, thanks to Charles, which eventually led me to this:
http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Eco_Umberto.html
...Eco employs his education as a medievalist in his novel The Name of the Rose, which was made into a movie starring Sean Connery as a monk who investigates a series of murders revolving around a monastery library. He is particularly good at translating medieval religious controversies and heresies into modern political and economic terms so that the reader can understand them without being a theologian. At the conclusion of that novel, we are left with a monk attempting to reconstruct a library based on scraps and attempting to create meaning by the combination of random pieces of information. This monk is fulfilling the role of a reader....Eco's characters partially enact literary theory, as they demonstrate the way that meaning is manufactured by consciousness, and how it may be impossible for any human reading to be without meaning. As in semiotics, it is possible that there is an order antecedent to even the consciously random and that any manufactured meaning is true or false only to the degree that it is believed.

I discovered The Role of the Reader By Umberto Eco, which I may be forced to order, though it may be over my head; part of it can be viewed online at google books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=PrVb5Rn...#PPA147,M1