What is Semiotics Anyway?
A tour through an obscure academic discipline that helped make a handful of Brown University graduates very famous
In 1982 Ira Glass, the future creator and host of the public radio program “This American Life,” received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University in a discipline called Semiotics. On graduation day, Glass’s father took out a classified in the local newspaper and handed it to his son when he stepped down from the podium, diploma in hand.
“Corporate office seeks semiotics grad for high paying position,” the ad read.
Glass dismissed the joke as inane, parental cluelessness. “My religion was semiotics,” he recalled. “Before semiotics I was, like, a middle-class kid who didn’t know what he believed. . .. Semiotics, basically, was exactly the way I defined myself.”
It was not only Glass who defined himself as a Brown semiotician. From its founding as a fledgling “program” in 1974 to its morphing into a full scale Department of Modern Culture and Media in 1996, Brown semiotics produced a crop of creators that, if they don’t exactly dominate the cultural mainstream, certainly have grown famous sparring with it. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, Academy Award-nominated director Todd Haynes, legendary indie producer Christine…
