Abstract
Few people can show mathematics, physics, chemistry, geometry, or foreign language among the lessons they love in the educational process. It is no doubt that these lessons, which are difficult to understand and challenging to solve, still maintain their vitality in memories. Apart from these well-known essential areas, it is undeniable that among the new branches of science that developed in the 20th century, one is least as scary as the others. Semiotics (or semiology) is one of the problematic fields with its sophisticated theories in the 19th century until Arthur Asa Berger applied the edutainment (learning by fun) method to semiotics by his work “Saussure Suspects.”
TopArthur Asa Berger As An Academician And His Projects As A Narrator
Arthur Asa Berger has a B.A. in literature and philosophy. He studied these subjects assuming that “a good education would fit me for any job. He applied to graduate school in journalism, thinking that he liked to write and might find journalism an exciting career. The University of California in Berkeley accepted him to its journalism school. While there he was offered a fellowship from the University of Iowa and went there. He focused on magazine journalism and took philosophy courses with Gustav Bergmann from the Vienna Circle. While at Iowa he was the University of Iowa’s student newspaper’s music and theater critic.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Edutainment: It is a way of teaching, as students having fun at the same time.
Ferdinand de Saussure: The Swissman who first claimed “semiology” as a scientific discipline apart from linguistics. He is one of the suspects among other academicians in Berger’s story. He is taken from real life as one of the academic heroes in the story.
Sign: It is the main object of semiotics that stands for anything except itself, which could be a colour, a sound, an image, a gesture conveying a meaning.
Signifier: Is the part of the sign that contains a combination of sounds or symbols or images that represent a word a person or thing that signifies.
Murder Mystery: It is a type of tricky story in which a detective tries to find the murderer. It is the type that Arthur Asa Berger employs in his edutainment stories frequently.
Semiotics: A discipline which studies “signs.” Berger here describes himself as the lecturer of semiotics.
Signified: It is the meaning conveyed or evoked in mind by the signifier.