edited by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw contributions by Roxane Jubert, Jinjia li, Claude Mouchard, Jacques Neefs, Alexandra Pappas, Lorraine Piroux, Tiphaine Samoyault, Richard Serrano, Buzz Spector, Peter Stallybrass, Marilyn Symmes, James Gordon Brotherston, Phillip Dennis Cate, Francois Cornilliat, Beatrice Fraenkel and Cynthia Hahn introduction by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw
Rutgers University Press, 2011 eISBN: 978-0-8135-8319-8 | Cloth: 978-0-8135-4882-1 | Paper: 978-0-8135-4883-8 Library of Congress Classification P93.5.V545 2011 Dewey Decimal Classification 302.23
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Exploring the concept and history of visual and graphic epistemologies, this engrossing collection of essays by artists, curators, and scholars provides keen insights into the many forms of connection between visibility and legibility. With more than 130 color and black-and-white photographs, Visible Writings sheds new light on the visual dimensions of writing as well as writing's interaction with images in ways that affect our experiences of reading and seeing.
Multicultural in character and historical in range, essays discuss pre-Colombian Mesoamerican scripts, inscriptions on ancient Greek vases, medieval illuminations, Renaissance prints, Enlightenment concepts of the legible, and the Western "reading" of Chinese ideograms. A rich array of modern forms, including comics, poster art, typographic signs, scribblings in writers' manuscripts, anthropomorphic statistical pictograms, the street writings of 9/11, intersections between poetry and painting, the use of color in literary texts, and the use of writing in visual art are also addressed.
Visible Writings reaches outside the traditional venues of literature and art history into topics that consider design, history of writing, philosophy of language, and the emerging area of visual studies. Marija Dalbello, Mary Shaw, and the other contributors offer both scholars and those with a more casual interest in literature and art the opportunity, simply stated, to see the writing on the wall.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
MARIJA DALBELLO is an associate professor of information science at Rutgers University. Her research and publications focus on visual genres and visual epistemologies, digital heritage, the history of knowledge, documents, and collections. She coedited Print Culture in Croatia: The Canon and the Borderlands.
MARY SHAW is a professor of French at Rutgers University. She is the author and editor of several books, among them The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry and Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé: The Passage from Art to Ritual.
REVIEWS
"This vastly learned, superbly illustrated collection has not a dull text within it. I was enlightened and fascinated by every essay on every topic. Visible Writings is a book to treasure."
— Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor ofThe Graduate Center, CUNY
"The essays are well-written, and all are well-researched, in many cases representing the cutting edge within their fields. The collection is historical in range and multicultural in character and is rather unique in range and ambition. Well-illustrated and well-produced, it is recommended for academic libraries supporting programs in visual culture, art, literature, linguistics, and French studies, particularly at postgraduate level."
— Art Libraries Society of North American Reviews
"This is an imaginative collection of tightly-argued, well-researched pieces that expose the multiple dimensions of all that makes writing visible. Addressing many forms and formats, the book makes excellent—and entertaining—reading!"
— Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mary Shaw
Introduction: Marija Dalbello
Buzz Spector, Encyclopaedia
Contours of Meaning in the Scripts of Ancient Mesoamerica: Western Epistemology and the Phonetic Issue
Arts in Letters: The Aesthetics of Ancient Greek Writing
Letter and Spirit: The Power of the Letter, the Enlivenment of the Word in Medieval Art
Visible and Invisible Letters: Text versus Image in Renaissance England and Europe
Illegibility and Grammaphobia in Paul Et Virginie
Written on the Page
Kafka
Face to Face
As If
Sur-face Text-ure
Un coup de dés and La Prose du Transsibérien: A Study in Contraries
Mathematics for "Just Plain Folks": Allegories of Quantitative and Qualitative Information in the Habsburg Sphere
Beneath the Words: Visual Messages in French Fin-de-Siècle Posters
How Do You Pronounce a Pictogram?: On "Visible Writing" in Comics
Inviting Words into the Image: Multiple Meanings in Modern and Contemporary Art
Color Writings: On Three Polychrome Texts
Joyc-aean
A Rose Is...
Kafka-esque
Actual Words of Art
The Figurative and the Gestural: Chinese Writing According to
Marcel Granet
edited by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw contributions by Roxane Jubert, Jinjia li, Claude Mouchard, Jacques Neefs, Alexandra Pappas, Lorraine Piroux, Tiphaine Samoyault, Richard Serrano, Buzz Spector, Peter Stallybrass, Marilyn Symmes, James Gordon Brotherston, Phillip Dennis Cate, Francois Cornilliat, Beatrice Fraenkel and Cynthia Hahn introduction by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw
Rutgers University Press, 2011 eISBN: 978-0-8135-8319-8 Cloth: 978-0-8135-4882-1 Paper: 978-0-8135-4883-8
Exploring the concept and history of visual and graphic epistemologies, this engrossing collection of essays by artists, curators, and scholars provides keen insights into the many forms of connection between visibility and legibility. With more than 130 color and black-and-white photographs, Visible Writings sheds new light on the visual dimensions of writing as well as writing's interaction with images in ways that affect our experiences of reading and seeing.
Multicultural in character and historical in range, essays discuss pre-Colombian Mesoamerican scripts, inscriptions on ancient Greek vases, medieval illuminations, Renaissance prints, Enlightenment concepts of the legible, and the Western "reading" of Chinese ideograms. A rich array of modern forms, including comics, poster art, typographic signs, scribblings in writers' manuscripts, anthropomorphic statistical pictograms, the street writings of 9/11, intersections between poetry and painting, the use of color in literary texts, and the use of writing in visual art are also addressed.
Visible Writings reaches outside the traditional venues of literature and art history into topics that consider design, history of writing, philosophy of language, and the emerging area of visual studies. Marija Dalbello, Mary Shaw, and the other contributors offer both scholars and those with a more casual interest in literature and art the opportunity, simply stated, to see the writing on the wall.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
MARIJA DALBELLO is an associate professor of information science at Rutgers University. Her research and publications focus on visual genres and visual epistemologies, digital heritage, the history of knowledge, documents, and collections. She coedited Print Culture in Croatia: The Canon and the Borderlands.
MARY SHAW is a professor of French at Rutgers University. She is the author and editor of several books, among them The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry and Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé: The Passage from Art to Ritual.
REVIEWS
"This vastly learned, superbly illustrated collection has not a dull text within it. I was enlightened and fascinated by every essay on every topic. Visible Writings is a book to treasure."
— Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor ofThe Graduate Center, CUNY
"The essays are well-written, and all are well-researched, in many cases representing the cutting edge within their fields. The collection is historical in range and multicultural in character and is rather unique in range and ambition. Well-illustrated and well-produced, it is recommended for academic libraries supporting programs in visual culture, art, literature, linguistics, and French studies, particularly at postgraduate level."
— Art Libraries Society of North American Reviews
"This is an imaginative collection of tightly-argued, well-researched pieces that expose the multiple dimensions of all that makes writing visible. Addressing many forms and formats, the book makes excellent—and entertaining—reading!"
— Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mary Shaw
Introduction: Marija Dalbello
Buzz Spector, Encyclopaedia
Contours of Meaning in the Scripts of Ancient Mesoamerica: Western Epistemology and the Phonetic Issue
Arts in Letters: The Aesthetics of Ancient Greek Writing
Letter and Spirit: The Power of the Letter, the Enlivenment of the Word in Medieval Art
Visible and Invisible Letters: Text versus Image in Renaissance England and Europe
Illegibility and Grammaphobia in Paul Et Virginie
Written on the Page
Kafka
Face to Face
As If
Sur-face Text-ure
Un coup de dés and La Prose du Transsibérien: A Study in Contraries
Mathematics for "Just Plain Folks": Allegories of Quantitative and Qualitative Information in the Habsburg Sphere
Beneath the Words: Visual Messages in French Fin-de-Siècle Posters
How Do You Pronounce a Pictogram?: On "Visible Writing" in Comics
Inviting Words into the Image: Multiple Meanings in Modern and Contemporary Art
Color Writings: On Three Polychrome Texts
Joyc-aean
A Rose Is...
Kafka-esque
Actual Words of Art
The Figurative and the Gestural: Chinese Writing According to
Marcel Granet
Michaux: To Be Read? To Be Seen?
Reading the Alhambra
Catastrophe Writings: In the Wake of September 11
...visible, legible, illegible: around a limit...
Sttmnt
Colloquium #1 (Picture Puzzles)
Colloquium #2
Colloquium #3
Colloquium #4
Notes on Contributors
Index
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC