Examines how literary criticism exploits and marginalizes the poem as printed artifact. Argues that the author-centered, phonocentric premise of close reading neutralizes spatial dynamics and reduces material identity to the status of a transparent medium. Suggests that appreciation of silent visual form is a convention of post modernist writing.…

Introduces this issue of the journal, which is devoted to new perspectives on critical histories of graphic design. Notes that the essays in this issue offer examples of the variety of interpretative approaches available that serve to question both the previously unchallenged acceptance of historical explanations and the transcendent understanding…

Through a bilingual reading of Beckett's "Mal vu mal dit," the illusion of painted relief for printed letters is created. Colors manifest themselves through the continual process of translation. The French translation adds color to the black and white English text. (DF)

Analyzes several texts of Italian poetry to show that signs in poetic language are visual and that they may function independently of their relationship with spoken language. Maintains that poetic language is motivated in its visuality and that it is iconic in a fundamental way. (FL)

Suggests that a poetic writing of traits, inviting readers to seek meaning in a poem's visual form, rests on a myth of the portrait in which marks of a written language are drawn directly from nature. (DF)

Explores the tenets of both the New Criticism and reader response criticism, and concludes that there is a need for a new imperative in criticism that conceives literary understanding in terms of a communication process in which both text and reader are granted importance. (FL)

Argues that Wittgenstein's picture theory in "Tractatus" is, contrary to widespread assumptions, actually about pictures in several important senses, and that it offers a more rigorous and logical model of graphic meaning than many later theories. (TB)

Puts four poems written by Vladimir Mayakovsky into social and historical context by performing a content analysis. Discusses the revolutionary nature of the poetic and typographic communication and the circumstances surrounding the poems' publication. (KEH)