The Editors: Norma Bouchard received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University. She is the author of numerous articles, including essays on Umberto Eco and Samuel Beckett.Veronica Pravadelli is affiliated with the Department of Film Studies at the University of Roma Tre (Italy). She has published essays on American musicals and melodrama, and on the films of Chantal Ackerman. She is also co-editor of Studi Viscontiani (1997).

• Contents: Norma Bouchard / Veronica Pravadelli: Introduction - Patrizia Violi: Individual and Communal Encyclopedias - Davide Del Bello: The Search for the Perfect Sign: Eco, Vico, and the Destiniy of Rhetoric in European Culture - Peter Carravetta: Hermeneutic Aspects of Eco's Later Works - Helen Bennett: The Limitations of Openness: Foucault's Pendulum and Kabbalah - Walter Stephens: Desperately Seeking Satan: Witchcraft and Censorship in The Name of the Rose - Rocco Capozzi: Libraries, Encyclopedias, and Rhizomes: Popularizing Culture in Eco's Superfictions - Remo Ceserani: Eco's (Post)modernist Fictions - Linda Hutcheon: Eco's Echoes: Ironizing the (Post)Modern - Diane Elam: P.S. «I Love You»: Umberto Eco and The Romance of the Reader - Peter Bondanella: Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: From Structuralism to Semiotics - Maurizio Rebaudengo: Between Shelves and Columns: Scattered Fragments of a Semiotic Discourse - Christine Ann Evans: Eco's Fifth Column: The Critic of Culture Within the Precincts of the Popular - Francesco Casetti and Barbara Grespi: Cinema and the Question of Reception - Umberto Eco: How and Why I Write.