Umberto Eco and Football (Postmodern Encounters)

Umberto Eco is popularly known for his best-selling novel, The Name of the Rose. This was a quintessential postmodernist fiction devised by an Italian professor of semiotics, an academic versed in medieval philosophy and linguistics but equally at ease with writing mass media journalism. Eco, football fan and Sherlock Holmes of semiotics, blurs the boundaries between ‘low’ and ‘high’ cultures. Eco is a public intellectual engaged in reading the practices of everyday life. Football for him is a metaphor, a motif and a vehicle for interpreting the nuances and excesses of our human fascination with ideals – ideals that are mobilised by culture into obsessions with sports celebrities. Football is more than a game – it is a sign system that codes experience and gives it meaning on a number of levels. It allows the spectator to read life with the help of the media apparatuses that direct and control our viewing experiences. "Umberto Eco and Football" engages with Eco the cultural critic as he meanders through the signs of culture with a keen and witty eye for the forgotten details of life’s great text, its serendipities, its misreadings.