Abstract

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