BASIC CONSIDERATIONS

Whenever language is written on tangible surfaces, it acquires visible and tactile components, since it becomes part of a physical object that can be seen and touched. And just as spoken language is regularly interpreted in the light of the speaker's manner and other aspects of the situation in which the utterance occurs, so the physical setting of written language plays a role in readers' responses. The visual display of language has been increasingly studied in recent years as part of an interdisciplinary trend in which the visual attributes of artifacts are being intensively scrutinized in more fields than before. On July 19, 1996, the Chronicle of Higher Education – always alert to movements in scholarly fashion – ran an article by Scott Heller entitled “Visual Images Replace Text as Focal Point for Many Scholars,” describing the growth of “visual culture” as a historical field that brings together scholars from such traditional disciplines as literature, philosophy, art, film, and anthropology.

One stimulus to this movement is no doubt the general dominance of film and video in the last half of the twentieth century, which has led to greater awareness of the importance of visual communication in the centuries before those media existed. Another influential factor is the increasing emphasis, over the last third of the twentieth century, on the study of audience responses to cultural products and the accompanying view of creative works as socially constructed.