SEMIOTICIANS HAVE MORE FUN: Review

Depending on how you want to count some of the subtitled units, what we have here is a collection of roughly two dozen (26 by my count) pieces of varying length (the longest consists of 55 pages, the shortest of three), most of them written during the 1970's, though there are four from the 1960's and six from the 1980's; and the most recent, ''Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,'' was written in 1984. One, ''The Return of the Middle Ages,'' is not dated. These pieces, Mr. [Umberto Eco] announces in his ''Preface to the American Edition,'' were all written for newspapers and magazines. (Only one, ''De Interpretatione,'' dealing with Mr. Antonioni's documentary on China, ''Chung Kuo,'' is specifically credited, to Film Quarterly.) Of course he has a theory about this. ''I believe that an intellectual should use the newspapers the way private diaries and personal letters were once used,'' he writes. ''At white heat, in the rush of an emotion, stimulated by an event, you write your reflections, hoping that someone will read them and forget them.'' Fine and dandy. The result is something between, say, the boogie and boogaloo of Tom Wolfe and the stately, classic downwind sailing of John Updike.