Required Readings

Bellos, David. Is That a Fish In Your Ear?, Chapters 2, 3, 8, 9 and 29

Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. The World’s Writing Systems. Part 1: Grammatology

Sanders, Barry and Ivan Illich. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. Chapter 4: Translation and Language

Optional Readings (I won’t be distributing hardcopies of these):

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct, Chapter 8: The Tower of Babel

Pindell, Howardena. “Words with Ruscha,” Leave Any Information at the Signal.

Katchadourian, Nina and Sabira Ståhlberg. “Esperanto: An Interview with Sabira Ståhlberg,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 1, Winter 2000/01

The above article is from the first issue of Cabinet, “Invented Languages” This entire issue is worth reading, so I’m posting the whole issue’s pdf here, which I’m probably not supposed to do . . .

Konnikova, Maria. “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades,” The New York Times, June 2, 2014.

Required:

Selected pages from America Starts Here (Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler) – this file is huge cause I thought color scans would be worth it.

Brought To You By The Letter I, by Jessica Winters, from MoMA’s Ecstatic Alphabet/Heaps of Language exhibition catalog

Optional, but it’s only a few pages:

Selected pages from Sign Painters, by Faith Levine and Sam Macon