Johanna Drucker

Modern poetics takes one crucial turn through Ezra Pound’s notion of the “ideogram,” a concept that had a lasting impact through the Imagists andtheir influence. The ideogram borrows from Pound’s ideas about Chinese characters, their ability to condense complex representation into a figuredform in an economic but resonant image. By contrast, the compositional technique embodied in French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s unique work, UnCoup de Dés, can be characterized as “diagrammatic,” driven by semantic relations expressed spatially in a distributed field. This essay explores thatdiagrammatic work and it implications as a compositional technique.

The garish glow of neon was part of what put Las Vegas on the map—quite literally. The city’s most distinctive form of expression, neon signs tell an elaborate story of the history of Las Vegas, from their debut in 1929 at the onset of the Depression, when their seductive tones lured travelers through the Mojave Desert to part with scarce dollars, to today, when their flickering glow is a vanishing facet of the gaudy spectacle that is contemporary Vegas. Established in 1996 to preserve Las Vegas’s underappreciated neon heritage, the Neon Boneyard houses many of the city's historic casino signs on a three-acre site at the edge of the city. The core of the collection of unrestored signage came from the pioneering Young Electric Sign Company, one of the first to produce neon signs in the area; but, in recent years, it has grown through donations from businesses and individuals who appreciate the key role played by neon in the growth of Las Vegas. Through Judy Natal’s photographs, the Neon Boneyard becomes a dynamic archaeological site that brings Vegas’s past to life in startling ways. The towering figure of Mr. O’Lucky becomes a home for the homeless, while the crumpled sign of a wedding chapel reflects the faded dreams of a lost paradise. Through such juxtapositions of success and failure, of past and present, Neon Boneyard: Las Vegas A–Z returns us to an earlier image of Vegas, suffused with the warm, commercial glow of neon, lighting the desert and inventing modern nightlife.

Drucker skillfully traces the development of this critical position, suggesting a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists based on a rereading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara. Drucker explores the context for experimental typography in terms of printing, handwriting, and other practices concerned with the visual representation of language. Her book concludes with a brief look at the ways in which experimental techniques of the early avant-garde were transformed in both literary work and in applications to commercial design throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

The purpose of this dissertation is to apply linguistic theory to the analysis of typography in order to demonstrate that the visual representation of language enters into the production of meaning, and to question the way typography functions within the discourse of the philosophical concept of the 'Logos'. ;Experimental typography used in literary works and journals between 1909 and 1923 has been used as the material for study, partly because of its richness, and partly because of the hstorical moment in which it was executed, a moment in which the fundamentals of structural linguistics, from which twentieth century linguistics would largely take its form, were being formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure. The dissertation proposes that the examination of this experimental typography according to the principles of Saussure's linguistics provides insight into Saussure's theoretical formulation,and that the Saussurean principles can be used to define the mechanisms whereby typographic representation affects the linguistic process. Saussure's linguistics has been the object of attack for the philosophical assumptions about language which underpin it, and consequently provides a logical starting point for the examination of these philosophical issues as they relate to typography. ;The dissertation begins with a discussion of Saussure's significance in the history of writing, and an answer to Saussure's most extreme critic, Jacques Derrida; a short background chapter on the status of typography at the time of the first typographic experiments is followed by four sections which each focus on a different typographic experiment: the work of F. T. Marinetti, Ilia Zdanevitch, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara, each analyzed according to linguistic principles. Finally, this typographic work is set against the larger context of activity in poetics and the visual arts as they contributed to the development of an attitude toward language and its representation in the first decades of the twentieth century, the period within which this activity first appeared and then disappeared