Perspectives on Literacy

CCR 651, Spring 2000

Rebecca Moore Howard

  1. "For ancient rhetors and rhetoricians, spoken discourse was infinitely more powerful and persuasive than was written composition" (233). This importance was based partly on the "scarcity of writing ability" and also on how small were the public gatherings. "Ancient rhetoricians would be very surprised by the modern association of intelligence and education with literacy–the ability to read and write. For them, writing was an accessory technology, a support for memory as a way of storing information" (234).1
  2. "The word 'literacy' reveals its liaison with the history of reading and writing. This history shows, as Derrida has suggested, how the figure of the book has dominated thought, has made writing the transcription of something prior to it, the orality of the voice, the authority of God or nature or state" (219).2
  3. "[U]ncritical literacy–the ability to read and write unreflectively that is often called functional literacy–invites and sustains false magic. To the extent that mass media generally advertise a reductive, technocratic ideology of adaptation, they are the agents of false magic. More important, to the extent that education and educators generally advertise a reductive, technocratic ideology of adaptation, they are the agents of false magic" (709).3
  4. "I start with the idea that literacy is not merely the capacity to understand the conceptual content of writings and utterances but the ability to participate fully in a set of social and intellectual practices."4
  5. "Literacy is a heavy word, a concept so full of meaning that it is often misused to mean more and less than it does. For us, writing, as literacy, means being in possession of language, knowing its shapes and possibilities, being so accustomed to its grammar and rules that the why is unnecessary, always aware that writing is an expression of thinking, a give-away of how we think and feel and judge."5
  6. Narrowly defined, literacy refers to "basic reading and writing." But theorists such as Lunsford have challenged this definition; they have done the good work of describing literacy as "a set of social and political practices" (408). Literacy is "not static but interactive" (432).6
  7. "[I]t takes only a moderate degree of literacy to make a tremendous difference in thought processes" (50). Literacy is not just a thought pattern, it's also a lifestyle (43). When literate people lose their minds, they withdraw into themselves, whereas oral lunatics injure others (69).
    "[F]unctionally literate human beings really are . . . beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing." The influence of literacy on thought extends even to the literate person's oral expression (78).7
  8. "[A] person who does not control the dominant code of literacy in a society that generates more writing than any society in history is likely to be pitched against more obstacles than are apparent to those who have already mastered that code" (109-10).8
  9. Talk about the literacy crisis ignores the fact that literacy itself has changed in the twentieth century (174-175). Both E.D. Hirsch and Richard Lanham link literacy learning with the social condition, but neither demonstrates that literacy learning will cause racial equality or social advantage (176).9
  10. Some people don't have the leisure for literacy (14-15), and not everyone has the resources for social activism (19).10
  11. "[W]e behave as if the minority problem is the immigrant problem. Two generations of learning the language and the ways of America, and all will be better, we hear. But two generations come and go and all that happens is that the minority's native tongue is gone" (19).11
  12. "Scholars now recognize that literacy is a trope, the meaning of which is up for grabs. Defining literacy is thus a site of political struggle." Lu offers a vision of an "ideal literate self" that would pursue individual agency while engaging in "critical affirmation"–respecting the differential representation of and access to literacy that is occasioned by cultural and social factors.12

1 Crowley, Sharon. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. New York: MacMillan, 1994.
2 Clark, Suzanne. "Literacy and Teaching: In Search of a 'Language of Possibility.'" College English 53.2 (February 1991): 214.
3 Covino, William. "Magic, Literacy, and the National Enquirer." Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. Ed. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. New York: MLA, 1991. Rpt. Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. Ed. William A. Covino and David A. Jolliffe. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. 699-711.
4 James Boyd White, "The Invisible Discourse of the Law." fforum: Essays on Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. Ed. Patricia L. Stock. Boynton/Cook, 1983, 56.
5 Report of the Association of American Colleges (1985), qtd. in White, Edward M. Developing Successful College Writing Programs. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989, 3.
6 Barton, Ellen L. "Literacy in (Inter)Action." College English 59.4 (April 1997): 408-37.
7 Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.
8 Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
9 Flannery, Kathryn T. The Emperor's New Clothes: Literature, Literacy, and the Ideology of Style. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1994.
10 Cushman, Ellen. "The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change." College Composition and Communication 47.1 (February 1996): 7-28.
11 Villanueva, Victor, Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.
12 Lu, Min-Zhan. "Redefining the Literate Self: The Politics of Critical Affirmation." College Composition and Communication 51.2 (December 1999): 172-194.