'Betcha Can't Read My Mind: The Orientations of Literacy Disc...
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Saved by 2 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-07-15
- Bibliothecaire on 2008-07-21 - Tags litteracy , writing , orality , Ong , Goody , Barthes , Derrida
- Neuromancien on 2008-07-15 - Tags literacy
Public Sticky notes
the various literacies which educational, theoretical, and political pundits identify
are often heralded by what they see is a "crisis" climate
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The current belief that literacy is the primary means by which the underprivileged
can achieve economic parity goes largely unchallenged, yet the belief is undertheorized
and problematic. I wish to contend here that literacy discourse locates
underprivilege to produce the valence of written language.
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literacy functions as myth in the
ways that written language use becomes ahistorical, and instead seems natural
(Barthes 129).
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Whenever a
community, culture, or society had access to, or utilized the technological means
for the creation and transmission of languages through time and space, that culture
stood in a distinctly privileged relationship to its non-literate surroundings.
Cultures with written language have used the relative permanence of signification
to dominate other cultures who were without written language.
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on 2008-07-21 by bibliothecaire
alphabétisation démocratique, "élitisme républicain"
As such, the correlation
of democracy with written language indicates that the ability to read and write
are fundamental to a citizen's access to voting and institutionalized education.
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"To politically
achieve a society where . . . individuals have access to information and the means
to participate productively implies a massive integration of . . . education
into most aspects of our society" (Mikulecky 31).
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The researchers reason that, if written
language is an index of political involvement, then literacy discourse is responsible
for immediate amelioration of illiteracy, and only by solving the illiteracy problem
can theorists affect access to democracy and social uplift.
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Language and literacy are "distinct entities,"
writes Godzich. Yet "literacy" has been allowed to serve as a
"shorthand description for a determinate set of relations that we have to
language, relations that arose under, and were conditioned by, concrete historical
circumstances" (Culture 5).
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Exclusions are characteristic
of literacy history, and they occur when written language is understood in a distinctly
temporal and dependent relation to spoken language. Literacy history,
as such, has determined that oral language, or "orality," precedes
written language, i.e. "literacy," and written language is therefore
a representation of the spoken word, or "phonetic" (Havelock 30; Martin
10). Wherever writing systems do not represent spoken language (the example
used most often is Chinese scripts), the written system of communication is an
example of "craft" literacy, but not the "widespread" literacy
of the West.
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The history
that becomes a written record of mankind begins in the Fifth Century, B.C., when
Herodotus established a "new relationship between the word and its referent,
a relationship that was more abstract" (Goody and Watt 15).
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Havelock has found that the Chinese picto-ideographic writing system is "inferior"
to the Greek alphabet (18). He then excludes Chinese in his history of literacy
because their writing system does not represent the smallest elements of spoken
language. Derrida calls this strategy "the death of Chinese" (79).
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Ong's theory regarding "orality," or the
"preliterate stage of human consciousness," reduces all human consciousness
to that which stands in relation to literacy
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Before the subject of literacy
discourse there is the subject of language, and it is this subject who circulates
outside the economy of literacy discourse and its institutional affiliations.
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Public Comment