Le professeur Umberto Eco à l'Université de Tel Aviv

Apparemment, Umberto Eco a donné deux conférences à à l'Université de Tel Aviv. La première fois était en 1979. David Lodge, son co-conférencier, se souvient de ce moment dans son livre The Year of Henry James: The story of a novel :

In the middle of June 1979 [...] I attended a conference in Israel on ‘Narrative Theory and Poetics of Fiction' organised by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics at Tel-Aviv University. Some fifty scholars from all over the world assembled in a hotel in Tel-Aviv to deliver and debate papers [...]. One evening we were all bussed into the university for an official reception, followed by two public lectures. I had been asked to give one of them, and the other was to be given by Professor Umberto Eco of the University of Bologna, whom I had not previously met: a barrel-chested, bearded, genial man, who spoke fluent English accompanied by all the expressive body language one expects of Italians. To be invited to lecture was a kind of honour, but it was one both of us would gladly have relinquished. The weather was extremely hot, and the lecture theatre was not air-conditioned (I think the system had broken down). Our colleagues from the conference, who had already listened to five papers that day, were understandably resentful at being required to sit through two more lectures delivered end to end in conditions of stifling heat, and even the public' members of the audience looked somewhat listless. The chairman begged us to abbreviate our lectures [...], and making cuts on our feet, we managed to get through the session in just under an hour and a half. At the end Umberto Eco, his shirt soaked with perspiration from his animated performance, turned to me and said with a smile, ‘Well, we did it!'

I spoke on problematical endings in English fiction; he on ‘What is Semiotics?’ [...] Umberto Eco was well qualified to give [an] answer, being the author of A Theory of Semiotics (1976) and numerous other publications highly regarded by specialists [...]. At that time, outside Italy where he was also well known as a critic and journalist, his readers were almost exclusively academics [...]. What we did not know, in June 1979, was that he was writing a novel, which must have been well on the way to completion by then, and would be published in Italy the following year under the title, Il Nome della Rosa. What even Umberto Eco did not know was that over the next three or four years he would in consequence become one of the most famous writers in the world. 

La deuxième fois avait lieu en 2011 (au sujet d'un livre récent d'Eco, Confessions d'un jeune romancier). Comme Lodge note ci-dessus, Eco déjà était « one of the most famous writers in the world », et l'auditorium universitaire (le même auditorium ?) était trop petit pour contenir tous les auditeurs qui voudraient assister à sa conférence...