This thesis, submitted during the final year of the Doctor of Arts in English literature and pedagogy at Idaho State University, considers the semiotic scholarship and fiction of Umberto Eco. After an introduction to Eco's literary semiotics, which is presented in a four-part discussion, I outline a semiotic approach to the structure of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, the most recent of Eco's five novels. After switching the discussion over to an historical, theoretical review of Eco's semiotic ideas, I return to the novel for a closer look at its narrator, Yambo, and the existential nature of the text from a metanarrative standpoint. In the final sections, I focus on Eco's semiotic voice, his use of memory as narrative encasement, and the role played by intertextuality in his novels. This thesis concludes with a return to The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and the uncloaking of literary semiotic connections that reveal Eco's philosophical vision for the novel.

The creative thesis below offers a preliminary application of Umberto Eco's literary semiotic theory to four chapters of my own novel fiction: Sabina's Novel. This creative application is an extension of the theoretical discussion in the thesis bound above. These theses have led to "The Mysterious Flame of CW Pedagogy," an article I have submitted to "Dispatches from the Front," an anthology of creative writing pedagogy.

Sabina's Novel relates in short stories and narrative fragments a family memoir that arcs over three generations. Sabina Dmitrikov is the granddaughter of a Slovak emigrant murdered during the 1918 pandemic near railroad tracks that come out of what had formerly been the Carnegie Steel Works in Homestead, Pennsylvania.

Through their application of literary semiotic theory, my chapters work toward a unified novel narrative that results from the implementation of the rhetorical constituents identified in Eco's philosophy of literary language.