ISSN: 2534-5192 (electronic) – 2681-8566 (print)

ISBN: 978-2-487055-06-3 e-ISBN: 978-2-487055-07-0 Download (NOT THERE YET)

De-aestheticizing the Artist's Brush. Calligraphy Manuals and the Pragmatics of Calligraphic Writing Helen Magowan  Download (71.05 MB) Abstract. Before the twentieth century, Japan had a highly developed publishing culture using woodblock print technology to produce books that maintained the appearance of a handwritten original text. This paper explores the making of meaning in pre-typographic Japanese through close reading of 18th century printed books. Focusing on manuals published for women teaching a particular script form called nyohitsu, I problematise the term “calligraphy” in its privileging of visual aesthetics, and argue that writing’s formal properties had pragmatic functions which operated to discursively construct social relationships. Nyohitsu’s distinctive graphic qualities demonstrate a complex indexicality, recasting the calligraphy brush as a tool for sophisticated modulation of the social effects of text in a manner which is unavailable to typography. DOI: https://doi.org/10.36824/2022-graf-mago How to cite How to cite in BIB Helen Magowan (2022), “De-aestheticizing the Artist's Brush. Calligraphy Manuals and the Pragmatics of Calligraphic Writing,” in Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2022 (Yannis Haralambous, Ed.), Grapholinguistics and Its Applications, Vol. 10, Brest: Fluxus Editions, 653–670. @INPROCEEDINGS{gla10-mago, AUTHOR = {Helen Magowan}, EDITOR = {Haralambous, Yannis}, TITLE = {{De-aestheticizing the Artist's Brush. Calligraphy Manuals and the Pragmatics of Calligraphic Writing}}, BOOKTITLE = {{Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2022}}, SERIES = {{Grapholinguistics and Its Applications}}, VOLUME = {10}, PUBLISHER = {Fluxus Editions}, ADDRESS = {Brest}, YEAR = {2022}, PAGES = {653--670}, DOI = {https://doi.org/10.36824/2022-graf-mago}, }