Typography as a regime of reading/looking in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970)

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the significance of typography in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. With this view,  the research deployed  multimodal  theory and  multimodal  stylistics theorized  and developed  by Kress & Van Leeuwen,   Van Leeuwen's  social semiotics, and  Norgaard's multimodal stylistics. The key features of typography and layout such as typeface, type styles, punctuation, salience, information value, discursive import and visual negation were put into practice in reading the novel. Typography was viewed as a semiotic resource along with genre as another semiotic resource. The findings of the research indicate the opposition between the verbal and visual modes in the novel. More specifically, Morrison helps the reader visually experience the dominance of eye and vision in America through activating his or her visual imagination. The paper also suggests that the blank space of the page is a suitable opportunity for battles of cultures, visual and verbal supremacy. Finally, the paper concludes that the act of reading The Bluest Eye is simultaneously an act of seeing and looking at, too.