Fictional Decoders
What can we learn from the methods of fictional semiotician-esque characters?
Decoder
Exploring fictional semiotician-esque action as depicted in books, movies, TV shows, and comics enjoyed by semioticians from around the world.
Shutter Island & Fractured
"Exploring delusional semiotics encourages us to question our own interpretative processes…"
The Sense of an Ending
"All too easily, the mind drifts back onto familiar paths."
The Name of the Rose
"Baskerville is obsessed with the meaning of things, their naming, our inevitable world of signs."
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
"Our job is: life, the universe, and everything."
One Hundred Years of Solitude
"Semiotic analysis can cause surprise — provoking tears of joy! Or sorrow!"
The Matrix
"Culture is the software of the mind."
Bleach
"Our work does not begin and end with the analysis of signs."
My Family and Other Animals
"There's no reason ever to be bored; there's always something to decode."
Rope
Theory and practice can be worlds apart.
Six Feet Under
What is life?
Babylon Berlin
"Charlotte approaches her investigations not only rationally, but with empathy and emotion."
Le Garage Hermétique
Call this sort of thing: narrative kintsugi — i.e., breaking, then making visible repairs to one's story.
Kosmos
"The semiosphere seductively lurks just out of our reach."
The Wonder
How to marshal myth, meaning, and embodied imagination…