Who wants to be a discipline?

In October of 1976, the newly-organized Semiotic Society of America convened its first conference. The attendees – literature professors, anthropologists, popular culture specialists, French teachers, art historians, linguists, philosophers – each seemed to have a personal reason for coming. Some were fans of Charles Sanders Peirce (an early figure in American semiotics) or Umberto Eco (at the time, the maverick spokesman for Europe's longstanding fascination with the study of signs). Others were looking for an intellectual escape from their academic home, which sometimes dismissed their work as falling outside the disciplinary pale. There were also a handful of well-meaning souls who probably did not belong at the meeting, but were welcomed nonetheless because the fledgling society was too polite (or needy) to turn anyone away. Though the organization never achieved a commanding presence in the academy, the " discipline " it represented enjoyed a burst of popularity in American universities in the 1980s, gradually settling into a small but generally respected niche. In the US, the modern " discipline " has its founding figure (the linguist Thomas Sebeok), a small professional society that meets annually, two free-standing journals, a profusion of books, and a scattering of graduate programs, though most students of semiotics are found not in departments of that name but in other academic enclaves – where their professors can