| Title: |
The Effects of Italic Handwriting on Legibility |
Vol: 23.4 |
| Author(s): |
Moilanen, Carolyn; Lehman, Charles |
| Abstract: |
The Italic Handwriting Series emphasizes a continuous flow in handwriting development and instruction, and is designed to allow a more natural transition from print to cursive. Italic handwriting was first implemented in Portland Public Schools during the 1983-84 school year at grade K-4, with an additional grade-level implementation during successive years. A concurrent three-year evaluation study examined the effects of italic handwriting instruction upon students' handwriting legibility. During the first year, legibility ratings declined from fall to spring. During the second and third years, ratings typically increase from fall to spring, but when the ratings were examined across all three years of italic implementation, a pattern of overall decline emerged. Because many student papers were written in a non-italic cursive, the entire sample was separated into italic and non-italic categories. Even though italic papers received significantly higher ratings, legibility ratings declined over time. While teachers' impressions of the italic program are generally favorable, primary teachers typically respond more positively about italic than do intermediate-grade teachers.
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| Title: |
Why Beginning Reading Must Be Word-By-Word: Disfluent Oral Reading and Orthographic Development |
Vol: 23.4 |
| Author(s): |
Bear, Donald R. |
| Abstract: |
The development of reading fluency is a gradual process which often entails strategies that make for a disfluent oral presentation. Disfluent oral reading, fingerpointing and reading aloud to oneself are the most characteristic behaviors of beginning readers. In this paper, research related to these reading behaviors and the corresponding spelling behaviors is presented. Based on an integrated theory of literacy proficiency, the synchrony between stages of reading and spelling development and the reasons why these stages are related are discussed.
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| Title: |
The Tales Typography Tells |
Vol: 23.4 |
| Author(s): |
Riedinger, Edward A. |
| Abstract: |
The skillful control of typographical elements is so powerful that it can determine a reader's perception of the nature of a literary masterpiece. The impact of typography becomes especially apparent when the same work is printed by two fine press publishers with differing views of it. This article examines the manipulation of typographical elements by the Allen Press and by publisher John Henry Nash in their editions of John Dryden's All for Love--and how this manipulation significantly changes one's perception of the focus and historical environments of this play.
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| Title: |
Image and Narritivity: Robbe-Grillet's La Belle Captive |
Vol: 23.4 |
| Author(s): |
Kadalenos, Emma |
| Abstract: |
A novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Ren Magritte, containing more than seventy-five of Magritte's paintings and a text by Robbe-Grillet, La Belle Captive (1975) illustrates the procedure Jacques Derrida describes in reading photographs: the story does not precede the telling. Magritte's paintings have no syntagmatic or diachronic element, no chronology. Paintings cut an event from the temporal continuum, removing it from any prior or sequential events which might imply causality. For Robbe-Grillet, to engender a narrative from paintings allows him to replace the "generative idea of chronology that is continuous and leading to an end"--permitting him to create a narrative without prior referent.
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| Title: |
By Way of Introduction: Inscriptions as Subversion |
Vol: 23.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Gandelman, Claude |
| Abstract: |
This introductory paper defines the scope of the research concerning "inscriptions in painting" from a primarily semiotic point of view. Taking as its point of departure the antinomy between the written word and painting or drawing, it shows that in many cases (from medieval pictograms through the baroque painter Phillipe de Champaigne to modern new concreteness and Max Beckmann) inscriptions are used to subvert the pictoral content of works of art. Sometimes, inscriptions also subvert theological interdictions to taboos. Inscriptions can also be said to represent the "performative" aspect of the work of art in the literal meaning of this word; that is they are used to direct the gaze of the observer to specific spots within the painting and are part of a manipulative strategy of the painter.
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| Title: |
Some Oriental Pseudo-Inscriptions in Renaissance Art |
Vol: 23.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Barasch, Moshe |
| Abstract: |
Inscriptions are legible, prominent public displays intended for reading. Two major groups of pseudo-inscriptions are identified: disguised inscriptions, which, at first glance, do not convey a text but appear to be real things such as an embroidery of pearls, and proper psuedo-inscriptions, which may have clearly delineated individual letters that taken together, make so sense. A study of Renaissance pseudo-inscriptions could uncover little-known facets of the encounter between East and West. That Venice and the Netherlands were, respectively, centers of Arabic and Hebrew pseudo-inscriptions coincides with the scholarly publishing concerns which they were known for during the Renaissance.
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| Title: |
The Order of Words and the Order of Things in Painting |
Vol: 23.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Martin, Louis |
| Abstract: |
The term "representation in this paper is taken in the sense that was given it by the grammarians and logicians of Port-Royal. The semiotic experiment attempted here explores the fluctuations of meaning produced by interferences between textual and figurative representation within one picture. Examples such as the portrait with its presentation of the subject and the topographical city plan with its representation of space by drawing and typographic naming of places provide the foundation for a more in-depth exploration of the Ex-voto of 1662, by Philippe de Champaigne. This painting is an exceptional illustration of the interference between image and text.
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| Title: |
The Contra-Diction of Design: Blake's Illustrations to Gray's "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat" |
Vol: 23.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Lussier, Mark |
| Abstract: |
When Blake undertook the illustration of the 1790 edition of Thomas Gray's Poems for John Flaxman, he did so with characteristic exuberance, providing both illustration and interpretation. Gray represented a contradiction to Blake: while he was a poet of empire aligned with Blake's aesthetic enemy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gray also wrote the radical indictment of empire, "The Bard." Blake's illustrations testify to this conflict; and in the "Ode," Blake's designs offer an other language, a contra-diction, that deconstructs Gray's conscious--and liberates his unconscious discourse. Blake's visual language champions desire's expression, specifically feminine desire, and resists the repression of that desire urged by Gray in his own controlled poetic diction. Blake's images define the visual field at the margin of discourse as the realm of the unconscious. Further, he demonstrates a number of concepts later argued by Jacques Lacan.
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| Title: |
Magritte's Words and Images |
Vol: 23.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Roque, George |
| Abstract: |
During Magritte's "linguistic period," completed in Paris (1927-1930), the first inscriptions of words appear in his paintings. But this period should not be arbitrarily isolated from the rest of the painter's production and from the totality of his preoccupations. Magritte's experiments with words and images are preceded by other experiments with his surrealist friends in Brussels, notably the production of advertising brochures which demanded the association of the name of the product with the image of it. His first inscription of words in a painting, "naked woman" written on a tree trunk, seems to stem from a preoccupation of Magritte and of male surrealists: How to represent woman? This obsession gives a key to understanding the "inscriptions" series: because they fail to adequately represent women, Magritte treats both images and words as mere representations, subject to an equally radical splitting from the "real" thing they are supposed to represent.
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| Title: |
The Books of Fernand Lger: Illustration and Inscription |
Vol: 23.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Hubert, Rene Riese |
| Abstract: |
Lger evolves from the early La fin du monde (where he imaginatively appropriates Cendrar's text) to his picture-poems in Les illuminations (where he merely selects passages from Rimbaud's text) to his own created text in Le Cirque, freely calligraphed and lithographed. He avoids the mimetic use of literary elements in order to subvert the conventions of the illustrated book and he subordinates meaning to a graphic interplay where word and image can, on occasion, become interchangeable. Already in La fin du monde, movement, especially of a circular nature, endows his book with a dynamics of its own. In Le Cirque, certain repetitive motifs develop mobility on a more structural level. Lger has thus subverted the borderline between readable and nonreadable, lyric and painterly. The scene of representation, verbal and visual, has undergone so drastic a transformation that the poetic and painterly signatures of the artist have become indistinguishable.
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| Title: |
Jasper Johns' Painted Words |
Vol: 23.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Levinger, Esther |
| Abstract: |
The painted words in Jasper Johns' art act in two different capacities. First, by being concealed beneath opaque layers of encaustic or oil paint, they partake in the artist's interrogation of visual perception. Second, by being repeatedly set against images, the painted words, this time visible, question classical representation. The questioning of sight is directed against the modernist limitation of painting to pure opticality as well as against the privileged position of sight in Western culture. Words and Johns' means of critiquing modernism; and the different relationships that he establishes between signifiers and signified, either verbal or pictoral, and between signs and things contradict the system of representation, both substitutional and repetitional.
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| Title: |
On the Verbal Art of a Modern Painter: the Work of Jules Kirschenbaum |
Vol: 23.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Gandelman, Claude |
| Abstract: |
Jules Kirschenbaum, a modern American artist whose work integrates inscriptions and figurative painting, studied in New York under masters belonging to the abstract expressionist and to the purely abstract school, yet he exhibited at the Whitney Museum with Cadmus and other protagonists of "magic realism." Later, his work took a wholly different turn; it became an art about meaning and about the 'meaning of meaning.' Kirschenbaum writes: "One contemporary concept is 'what you see is what you see.' In contrast to that, I am for an art in which what you see is only the beginning of an endless chain of illusions..."
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| Title: |
Magritte's Captivity in Robbe-Grillet's La Belle Captive: The Subjugation of the Image by the Word |
Vol: 23.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Ortquist, Leslie |
| Abstract: |
Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel La Belle Captive, which employs seventy-seven paintings by the Belgian surrealist Ren Magritte, is offered as a "collaboration," a playful interchange between word and image. Robbe-Grillet, who used the paintings variously as generative material and companion or counter-text to his written text after Magritte's death, provides in La Belle Captive an occasion to explore the relationships between verbal and visual text. The novel may be understood to demonstrate a fundamental relationship of inequality between word and image, a relationship of violation rather than collaboration between equal partners.
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| Title: |
The Visual Poem in the Eighteenth Century |
Vol: 23.1 |
| Author(s): |
Bradford, Richard |
| Abstract: |
"Visual Poetry" is a technique that we normally associate with seventeenth-century pattern verse and with the typographical format of modern free verse and concrete poetry. This essay is an examination of the ways in which eighteenth-century critics treated the visual format of traditional verse as a determinant in the readers' appreciation of form and meaning. Critics such as John Rice, John Walker and Joshua Steele reprinted sequences of verse in accordance with their ideals of oral delivery, and others such as Thomas Barnes and Peter Walkden Fogg, regarded the silent printed text as productive of effects which could be appreciated only via the interpretive faculty of the eye. The final section explores correspondences between the eighteenth-century work and modern criticism, and goes on to argue that twentieth-century appreciations of the visual format of verse are limited by their concentration upon the more extravagant typographic experiments of free verse.
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| Title: |
Mallarm and Apollinaire: The Unpunctured Text |
Vol: 23.1 |
| Author(s): |
York, R. A. |
| Abstract: |
It is common for modern French verse to be printed without punctuation. This raises the question of whether the rhythms of speech, as denoted by the line endings of verse, correspond redundantly to the syntactic and semantic patterns of the ideas expressed, as normally denoted by other punctuation. It is argued that in the verse writings of Stphane Mallarm, the suppression of normal punctuation, resulting in irresoluble ambiguities or in obscurities resolved only later in the text, obliges the reader to be especially conscious of his usual expectation of syntactic and semantic guidance and so requires him to concentrate to an exceptional degree on the tension between the physical activity of speech and the related ideational activity. In the work of Guillaume Apollinaire, on the contrary, the effect of omitting punctuation is to ensure that the reader can recognize simultaneously the varied sense perceptions related by the poet and to emphasize the immediately perceptible energetic rhythm of speech.
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| Title: |
Words-in-Freedom and the Oral Tradition |
Vol: 23.1 |
| Author(s): |
Webster, Michael |
| Abstract: |
Despite the fact that his early poetry was grounded in the oral rhetoric of nineteenth-century declamation, F.T. Marinetti invented a new form of visual poetry he called "words-in-freedom." This article explores ways in which oral and print characteristics meshed or clashed in the new form. The new style can be seen at least partially as visual notations for oral performance and as an attempt to unite the interior, isolated spaces of print with the exterior, social event of oral performance. This attempt failed because of coding difficulties occasioned by Marinetti's ideology of presence. A reading of Marinetti's poster-poem "Aprs la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto" confirms this view.
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| Title: |
Visual Form in Free Verse |
Vol: 23.1 |
| Author(s): |
Berry, Eleanor |
| Abstract: |
Visual form performs numerous significant and diverse functions in modern free verse poetry. The theoretical pronouncements of such poets as Robet Creeley, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky recognize only its function of scoring for performance and often belittle its significance. In representative works of these poets, however, we find lineation, line-grouping, spatial arrangement and particular graphological details operating both globally and locally to make meaning and to compose text. Even though opsis has been, since Aristotle, an acknowledged element of literary art, not only practitioners, but with certain exceptions, literary critics and theorists have failed to assign it more than a subordinate, supportive role. Historical approaches that privilege sound because of the originally oral nature of poetry are of little help in explaining the use of visual form in modern free verse. A functional approach, entailing careful attention to how visual form affects our experience of printed poems, can contribute toward developing "a theory of graphic prosody" such as John Hollander has called for. Functional analysis of visual form in representative free verse poems and passages yields a dozen distinct functions--rhetorical, mimetic and aesthetic functions that tend to support the illusion of the poem as unified and autonomous, and on the other hand, an equal number of functions that tend to be distintegrative and intertextual. Analysis of a passage from Pound's Cantos, using these functions as an analytical tool, shows that visual form helps realize this modern long poem's simultaneous drive toward coherence and impulse toward openness.
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| Title: |
Which Poem am I Reading? |
Vol: 23.1 |
| Author(s): |
Markham, E. A. |
| Abstract: |
Despite the traditional belief, endorsed by T.S. Eliot, that the printed poem should represent merely the equivalent of a musical score for its actualization in oral performance, the creative procedures of writing, performing and interpreting poetry are actually subtly interrelated. The voice, the persona of the poem, is encoded in its printed form; but in its release or realization in oral performance, it begins to resonate both with the intended idiom of its creator and with the conditioned, interpretive expectations of the audience. The poet-performer releases his poetry from the tyranny of the printed page. The author is a performing poet who illustrates his argument with examples from his own writing in which he seeks to recreate the voices of, among others, Paul St. Vincent, a young, black South Londoner; Sally Goodman, the white, English feminist; and Philpot the middle-aged, black cricket fan.
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| Title: |
Soundings Along the Lines |
Vol: 23.1 |
| Author(s): |
Waterman, Andrew |
| Abstract: |
Technique and form are integral to a poem's expression of its particular vision. Rhythm, lineation and syntax--sometimes played off against each other--collaborate with meaning to guide the reader's inner hearing of, and response to, a poem. The author illustrates this interrelationship with references to his own poems.
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