Semiotic Drift is an ongoing archive of fragments and short critical pieces.
The idea for Semiotic Drift and some of its fragments grew out of Nebulae: A Discourse in Fragments, the theoretical spine of my PhD, Cape Town/ International: The Preparation of a Memoir. Other pieces emerged from research for university courses I taught or from dreams, conversations, ideas, encounters, and observations. Semiotic Drift carries this work beyond its original contexts. New juxtapositions alter how the fragments can be read.
The writing moves between criticism and life writing. Subjects include film, television, video games, literature, art, digital culture, photographs, objects, dreams, memory, place, and ordinary observation. The pieces take different forms. Compressed essays. Autobiographical fragments. Theoretical notes. Lists. Quotations. Dreams. Visual analyses.
The fragments are numbered in the order they arrive. Readers may enter anywhere. Each piece can be read alone. Meanings also gather across the archive through recurrence, contradiction, proximity, omission, and drift.
The archive remains unfinished. Older fragments change beside newer ones. Subjects disappear and return. The site records the paths between academic research, creative practice, and daily life.
I was born in South Africa and live in the UK. I am a writer, independent scholar, educator, and publisher. As part of my PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing, I developed photo-sketching, a fragmentary image-text method for life writing. I spent several years as a university lecturer in English Literature, Creative Writing, and Media Studies. I also run Analog Submission Press, an independent small press devoted to limited-run poetry, prose, and hybrid writing.
This site runs on Bear Blog, a minimal platform with no third-party tracking. I use only its basic analytics. It keeps the focus on writing rather than metrics.
All writing is © Marc Brüseke unless otherwise noted. You are welcome to quote from the work or share excerpts with attribution.