Writing notes is an essential component of academic life, a ritual that is performed with as many handwritings as there are individuals. In her essay, Pamela M. Lee addresses the phenomenon of illegibility within notes: of what use are notes if they cannot be deciphered at a later time? Lee develops her semiotics of illegibility with reference to the extensive archive of notes written by the prominent American art historian Meyer Schapiro. In Lee s view, the illegibility of Schapiro s script stands in especially stark contrast to the clarity of his texts. Incorporating psychoanalysis and literary criticism, Lee s study draws from Schapiro s own unique approaches to the theory of signs, and in particular from his canonical paper On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs, which can be traced back to notes, excerpts of which are reproduced in this publication.Art historian and cultural critic Pamela M. Lee (*1967) is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
