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The article offers two approaches to the question of 'invisible punctuation,' theoretical and critical. The first is a taxonomy of modes of punctuational invisibility, identifying denial, repression, habituation, error and absence. Each is briefly discussed and some relations with technologies of reading are considered. The second considers the paragraphing, or lack of it, in Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry: one of the two early printed editions and at least one of the two MSS are monoparagraphic, a feature always silently eliminated by editors as a supposed carelessness. It is argued that this is improbable and that one form the Defence may have taken at Sidney's hands (and those of his literary executors) was monoparagraphic, a matter affecting tone, genre and the understanding of his argument. A short conclusion considers the current state of punctuational invisibility in relation to digital awareness.
The general thesis of this special issue, as of much work on punctuation drawing on the seminal studies of Malcolm Parkes,' might be cogently summarized in the proposition that 'punctuation remains too readily invisible.' It is of course ubiquitous, its presence before the eye co-extensive with the acts of reading and writing, but whether in textual studies or textbooks direct attention to punctuation remains unhappily rare. Two generations of post-/Parisian semioticians, loudly determined to grapple with every nuance of linguistic structure, have all but ignored it tout court, while the pedagogical practice of using 'fully modernized' texts, increasingly institutionalized since 1945 even at under/graduate level, obscures awareness of its historical development.
One way of seeing the issues involved is simply to ask in what ways punctuation can be 'invisible.' The idea of invisibility, seemingly simple, in any case tends to exhibit both paradox and displacement, as those who recall Poe's 'The Purloined Letter/ Freud'sfort-da game, or any film 'showing' invisibility will understand; any taxonomy of punctuational invisibility registers similar problems. Various approaches could be adopted, but all are likely in the end to come down to five heads that might be labelled denial, repression, habituation, error and absence.
Denial (in a legal rather than psychoanalytical sense) covers invisibility by definition- that is, exclusion from received definitions and hence awareness governed by such limitation (definire meaning 'to limit'). The most obvious and important...
