There's More to It Already Typography and Literature Studies: A Critique of Nina Norgaard's 'The semiotics of typography in literary texts' (2009)

Recently, typography has increasingly become a field explored by scholars of various disciplines, not all of them philologists. Although co-operation and mutual exchange are on the rise in the field, there are still deficits in this area. The aim of this article is a review primarily of the German-speaking academic discussion since 2000, but also of the long-existing field of 'bibliography'. It is in the form of a critique of an article published in Orbis Litterarum in 2009 (vol. 64, no. 2), and takes the opportunity to complement the original paper in discussing the relation between typography and literature in three subject areas: historicity of print technology and typographical convention, differences between analogue and digital print production, and the scope of the term 'typography'. The main methodological argument put forward is a claim for context-oriented approaches taking into account historical depth and technology, but also the latter's application by workers in the printing trade and authors from the literary field alike. Despite its relatively small scope as a reaction to a single article, the paper is written to spark further discussion.