CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language Volume 2 Issue 1 The Cultures of Popular Culture Article 12 2017 Writing in the Language of Reality: Interwar Experiments in Language Robin Fuller Trinity College Dublin,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/priamls Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Fuller, Robin (2017) "Writing in the Language of Reality: Interwar Experiments in Language," CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 12. doi:10.21427/D7GT4B Available at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/priamls/vol2/iss1/12 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Ceased publication at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License Fuller: Writing in the Language of Reality: Interwar Experiments in Langu Writing in the Language of Reality: Interwar Experiments in Language Robin Fuller School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
[email protected] Abstract This paper examines projects in universal communication from the interwar period, including Charles Kay Ogden’s Basic English, Otto Neurath’s Isotype, and László Moholy-Nagy’s typo-photo. The projects under discussion — experiments in language reform, graphic design and photography — were all born from a dissatisfaction with the imprecise, arbitrary and historically-contingent nature of established languages and semiotic systems.