Thursday, July 27, 2006

Trimbur, "Delivering the Message"

Trimbur, John. "Delivering the Message: Typography and the Materiality of Writing." Olson 188-202.

Trimbur opens with a lucid, concise account of the distinction between process and post-process movements.  "Process," he writes, becomes a given with the ubiquity of its foci: cognition, voice, conversation.  Post-process, rather than accepting as transparent the material orthodoxies operating implicitly alongside the design-lessness of the "Alphabetic Literacy Narrative," fronts materiality and so resurrects production and circulation key considerations in the activity of writing. 

In "The Materiality of Writing" section, Trimbur gives a thumbnail history of the "great Alphabetic Literacy Narrative" that elevates certain literacies at the expense of "'syllabic and logographic writing systems" while "banish[ing] pictographs and images to the status of illiteracy" (Faigley qtd. in Trimbur 190). It is not enough to regard writing as the making of meaning if we fail to take into account the material means of production and circulation. Trimbur, citing Kress, notes that we should prefer notions of literacy as built rather than acquired (191).

Trimbur recommends the study of typography as a means of attending again to the visual design of texts through layout, spacing patterns and typefaces.  In the middle section of the essay, he gives a brief overview of design studies and also emphasizes that 1. graphic designers and typographers have already begun to study design theory and history in ways that would be of interest to writing studies; and 2. we have yet to fully recognize the relevance of "design" to writing studies (194).

In the final section, "Typography in Theory and Practice," Trimbur keys on three ideas: 1. Narrativity of Letterforms (letterforms are meaningful, significant); 2. The Page as a Unit of Discourse (the page as a unit accounts for design patterns; elements in combination produce conglomerations of meaning); and 3. Division of Labor (designers and producers are now the same person; digital apparatuses have fused what once were more likely to be separate roles).

Claim: "My claim is that studying and teaching typography as the culturally salient means of producing writing can help locate composers in the labor process and thereby contribute to the larger post-process work of rematerializing literacy" (192).

"And yet, the moment writing theorists are starting to call 'post-process' must be seen not just as a repudiation of the process movement but also as an attempt to read into composition precisely the material conditions of the composer and the material pressures and limits of the composing process" (188).

"I argued a few years ago that essayist literacy--from the scientific prose of the Royal Society to the essay of the coffeehouse and also--emerged in the early modern period as a rhetoric of deproduction: a programmatic effort to reduce the figurative character of writing, minimize the need for interpretation, and thereby make the text more transparent ("Essayist")" (189).

"Accordingly, it should be no surprise that David Olson would want to make the essay into the culmination of alphabetic literacy precisely because it appears to transcend the visuality of writing by organizing the speech-sound abstractions of the alphabet into highly integrated grammatical and logical structures, forming self-sufficient, autonomous texts capable of speaking for themselves. The texts of essayist literacy, by Olson's account, appear to transmit meanings transparently, without reference to their mode and medium of production" (190).

"The problem is that, by and large, typography has been ghettoized in technical communication, where many compositionists think of it as a vocational skill" (192).

"Typography, on the other hand, calls attention to how the look of the page communicates meaning by treating text as a visual element that can be combined with images and other nonverbal forms to produce a unit of discourse" (197).

Related sources:

Benjamin, Walter. "The Author as Producer." 1934. Reflections: Essays, Aphorism, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken, 1978. 220-238.

Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Trumbur, John. "Essayist Literacy and the Rhetoric of Deproduction." Rhetoric Review 9 (1990): 72-86.

Posted by Derek Mueller at July 27, 2006 8:41 PM to Writing Technologies