Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings

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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"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)