Edited by Christopher Scott Wyatt and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss
Visual Rhetoric
Series Editor, David Blakesley (Founding Editor: Marguerite Helmers)
Winner, Best Nonfiction Cover Design, Ingram Industries (2018)
Information and Pricing
978-1-60235-973-4 (paperback, $60.00) 978-1-60235-977-2 (hardcover, $100.00) 978-1-60235-978-9 (PDF, $24.99) © 2018 by Parlor Press. 412 pages in full color on high quality paper with 94 illustrations, notes, and bibliography.
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About This Book
Stephen Bernhardt warned almost thirty years ago that our "preoccupation with conventional essay format" excludes the rhetorical rigor of typographic elements. John Trimbur extended this argument, noting that "one of the main obstacles to seeing the materiality of writing has been the essayist tradition and its notion of a transparent text." Visual rhetoric scholars have interrogated the ways in which meaning-making happens iconographically, photographically, and via other visual means. Type Matters now focuses on the visual, rhetorical work of typography.
Type Matters bridges the scholarship of typography and design with the field of rhetoric. Contributors address the ways in which and places where typography enacts or reveals rhetorical principles. The collection includes chapters that situate texts broadly; frame their discussions and analyses rhetorically, technologically, and culturally; draw from scholarship ranging from rhetoric and writing studies to graphic design theory and beyond; and explore the ways that the visual and tactile shapes of letters persuade and convey information to readers.
"Typographic rhetorics, typeface meaning studies, semiotics of typography, histories of print capitalism—the approaches to writing gathered in this groundbreaking collection show how understanding texts can never be just a matter of words alone. Instead, as co-editors Christopher Scott Wyatt and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss make clear, it is time to recognize that type matters: type signifies, it has personality, it makes things happen. From the intersection of writing studies, visual rhetoric, and graphic design, the contributors to this volume explore how the rhetoricity of typography works and, as a result, deepen our knowledge of the materiality of writing, its styles of inscription, and its worldly force." —John Trimbur, Emerson College
About the Editors
Christopher Scott Wyatt completed an MFA in Film and Digital Technology from Chatham University while co-editing Type Matters. His PhD is in Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Dànielle Nicole DeVoss is a professor of professional writing at Michigan State University. Her recent books include Making Space: Writing Instruction, Infrastructure, and Multiliteracies (with Jim Purdy, 2017) and Cultures of Copyright (with Martine Courant Rife, 2014).
Contents
Introduction: Type Matters
C. S. Wyatt and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss
1 On Type and Typographic Anatomy
C. S. Wyatt
2 Type Reveals Culture: A Defense of "Bad" Type
Garrett W. Nichols
3 "Give Us Back Our Serifs": The Cultural Rhetoric of Rage Against the [New] Google Logo
Philip Rice
4 The Development of Typeface Personas and the Consequences of Perceived Identities
Heather Noel Turner
5 Nostalgia for Handwriting: The Rhetoric of Comics Lettering
Aaron Kashtan
6 "All Your Font Are Belong to Us": Gaming in the Late Age of Print
Elizabeth J. Fleitz
7 Why I Hate Times New Roman, and Other Confessions of a Creative-Critical Scholar
Ames Hawkins
8 Why Bookerly Isn't (and Why That's Not Such a Terrible Thing)
John Logie
9 Jan Tschichold's Renunciation of Die Neue Typographie: The Anatomy and Ethics of a Typographical Reversal
David Bedsole
10 Typographic Nationalism and the Banal Uniformity of Imagined Communities
Jake Cowan
11 Logotypes in Place: A Visual Rhetorical History of Cigar City
Meredith A. Johnson, Peter Canno, Roxanna Palmer, Joshua M. Rea, and Tanya Zarlengo
12 Font of Wisdom: The Vernacular Rhetoric of the Serenity Prayer
William T. FitzGerald
13 Standardized Typography in Interactive Internet Environments
John R. Gallagher and Rebecca Tarsa
14 Kinetic Typography: Reinserting Embodied Delivery into Recorded Oral Texts
Christal Seahorn, Diana I. Bowen, Charles Jeffery Darwin, and Dragana Djordjevic
Index
Contributors
