After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Turin (1954), Eco worked as a cultural editor for Italian Radio-Television and lectured at the University of Turin (1956 64).
On leaving university, Eco worked in Milan for several years as a journalist, editing cultural programmes for Italy's state-owned RAI television network.
That's not to say eco-work in Costa Rica will count against you.
Ecos worked with chemical titan DuPont, helping it craft a message on nanotechnology that would appeal to the greenies.
Much of Eco's work explores the territory where healthy suspicion gives way to paranoia – an impulse which he believes we should guard ourselves against if we are to arrive at the truth.
Since the publication in 1980 of his first novel, The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco's work has come to be defined by a curious paradox – you never quite know what to expect but you can be absolutely sure that it will will bear the unmistakable stamp of Umberto Eco.
Conspiracies in general, and the Protocols in particular, have been recurrent themes in Eco's work, notably in his second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, where as a joke three nondescript book editors concoct a grand conspiracy that comes to take over their lives.
work as (Eco's) "Open Work": They "channel understanding along certain avenues, but [do] not force those in search of the meaning down a single or one-way alley" (ibidem, p. 203).
