Johanna Drucker

Calling attention to the visual materiality of the text, this book attempts to halt linear reading, trapping the eye in a field of letters which make a complex object on the page. The writing refers continually to the visceral character of language, literalizing metaphors of tongue, breath, and flesh. The work both embodies and discusses language as a physical form, one whose properties cannot be ignored by arriving at a disembodied content. The format of this work invokes a reference to the carmina figurata of the Renaissance -- works in which a sacred image was picked out in red letters against a field of black type so that a holy figure could be seen and meditated on in the process of reading. The technique is reversed here, with the red field of small type serving as a background in which large, black letters are arranged like figures on the red ground. This is a facsimile reprint of an original letterpress edition issued in 1989.

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