Quotes
The newspaper in mid-nineteenth century can be seen as a part of a fast growing, visually oriented print culture that rapidly changed the visual field. To understand its influence, it is crucial that the newspaper should not only be seen as a textual phenomenon, as the site of journalistic writing, but also be recognized as a visual phenomenon characterized by experiments in layout and typography. On a single page, different headlines, fonts, and font sizes could be seen, and a variety of brief pieces of prose, without any apparent connection, were presented to the reader. This fragmented form gave rise to a new mode of reading; linear reading was now abandoned in favor of discontinuous reading, browsing, and zapping on the page. Just as the flâneur let his gaze flicker in the street, the newspaper reader let his gaze flicker over the newspaper page.
What is interesting is that the aesthetics of the modern newspaper resemble, to a certain extent, modernist aesthetics. The juxtaposition of texts that have no apparent connection is based on the same principle that will later be crucial to the avant-garde: montage. The montage of the nineteenth century newspaper precedes the collages of Picasso and Braque, as well as the montages of avant-garde film. Furthermore, the typographical exploration of the newspaper page parallels the poetic exploration of the white space of the book page. The ultimate reference here is Stéphane Mallarmé, who scattered words all over the page in his poem ‘Un coup de dés’ (‘A Throw of the Dice’) (1897), using a variety of fonts and sizes. This pioneering poetic work should be seen in relation to Mallarmé’s experiments with typography and layout in the one-man journal ‘La Dernière Mode: Gazette du Monde et de la Famille’ (‘The Latest Fashion: A Gazette of High Society and of the Family’) in 1874. Presumably, his experience with the white surface of the newspaper page had an impact on his later typographical experiments as a poet.
–Marit Grøtta
