I Was an Under-Age Semiotician

It is an occupational hazard of being a writer to be appalled by the prose style you deployed in your youth. Most of the time the flaws reflect unchecked enthusiasm, or literary clichés that have not yet worn away, or a certain inability to settle on a defined voice. But reading my own college juvenilia, I have a strange and almost total sense of disconnection. This is from a paper I wrote at the age of 19: