(ORIGINALLY IN MICROSOFT WORD, COULD NOT FIND ATTACHMENT BUTTON ON BLOGGER)
Exploratory
#3: Self-Concept, Text, and Community: A Key
By Joel Bergholtz and Cindy Stewart
· “Subject”/Literacy: this
is the subject as well as their accompanying literacy. From a social
standpoint, one’s literacy cannot be removed from the individual subject’s
overall worth. The subject has their own conception of themselves on the
interior, but nonetheless exist out in the exterior. Thus, the subject has
identity markers both within themselves (in their sphere), representing the
ways these constructs are at play in the individual’s cognitive processes, and
outside of themselves (outside of their sphere). They also have life
experiences that exist out in the real world and thus influence their own cognitive
process, so life experiences are represented both within the subject and
outside of the subject.
· Society/identity markers: on
the right side of our schema are identity markers: sex, race, class, gender,
and other factors society constructs in particular ways that make up the world
around us. These influence the subject at the center of the schema.
· Texts: on
the left of our schema, you’ll find texts A, B, and C. Text A is a close-up of
the components a text is made up of: an author’s self-concept, life
experiences, texts read, and their identity markers. This is the content that
influences what they write that people such as the subject do not see, but
nonetheless still consume through their reading of the author’s text.
· People:
in the upper left of our schema, you’ll see people that the subject in focus is
connected to. The subject influences and is influenced by these people, who are
also identified by self-concept, life experiences, texts read, and the identity
markers placed upon them by society. They also see the various identities that
make up the world as our “subject” does, read texts that are also produced by
the experience of the authors, compose texts, and are networked with other
people.
OVERALL:
This
network is meant to show how a person is connected to a complex network of what
makes up society, the texts offered, and the people within society. All people,
then, engage in their own experiences which influence their composition or read
of a text, and in turn influence others who carry with them their own set of
life experiences and perceptions of the world. It is an infinite set of
connections that complicates how texts are both produced and interpreted.
CRITICAL REFLECTION POST
They Can’t Read; Our Master Narrative
When constructing our network map of literacy and community, I worked with Richard Ohmann’s “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital,” Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection,” and Ann Louise Keating’s “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ (De)Constructing ‘Race.’” As a result, I was mainly focused on the relationships between [class/literacy/technology], [race-as-construct, race as non-Other], and [connection]. What I came to notice were the ways that literacy and race function as exclusionary constructs that bars certain groups from what Keating might call the unacknowledged standard: (“‘whiteness’ operates as the unacknowledged standard or norm against which all so-called ‘minorites’ are measured”) (905). Meanwhile, Richard Ohmann identifies the unacknowledged standard as “the people who counted,” as he explains that lower classes became seen as a single, definable mass through the use of the term literacy: “’literacy’ offered a handy way to conceptualize an attribute of theirs which might be manipulated in one direction or the other for the stability of the social order and the prosperity and security of the people who counted” (677). Who counts? Those who are literate. But literacy has shifted from an effect to a cause, as Ohmann claims that “before the 19th century, literate and illiterate had a global, qualitative meaning—well-read and civilized, or the reverse—rather than indicating a line that divided those who could read and write from those who could not’” (675).
At first, I struggled with the difference between the two, as it seems both employ the master narrative that reads more or less like “to be literate is to be civilized.” However, I think the key difference here is that before the 19thcentury, talking about literate societies was talking about civilized societies in a general sense, and poor readers were still part of that society. However, in the 19th century, members of society began using the term as an identity marker for individuals that marked them as belonging to a certain class of people, as exemplified by George R. Stetson’s article “The Renaissance of Barbararism” in The New Princteon Review, November 1888. According to Ohmann, this is one of the earliest citations for the term literacy. This is significant, as it suggests that Stetson’s article—and, according to Ohmann, a host of other articles springing up in the same time, and linking literacy skills to class in the same way—use the term literacy in order to divide between those who matter and those who do not. Literacy, then, becomes construct. As a construct, it is framed as a cause for problems within society rather than an effect: Stetson claimed that this “brutalized class” has poisioned society with its “outrageous, inhuman, and barbarous crimes” (336, qtd on 675). Consider technologies that surround literacy: books, the printing press, wireless communication, and the computer. These would look different, Ohmann claims, if they were based around egalitarian values; consider, Ohmann asks his readers, what literacy might look like if it was developed by slaves to communicate without their masters realizing it (“for solidarity and revolt”), or if the printing press was celebrated as a way to bring philosophy and education for all, as the Utopians saw it (683).
I think it is significant that through all of these technological advances, literacy offers one a way into the conversation, but this conversation is mostly one-way. Rather than communication, literacy as groomed through monopoly capital has resulted in broadcasts, not conversations. Traditionally, Johndan Johnson Eilola points out, writing has been viewed as a product that “responds either to deeply held and inchoate feelings (expressivism) or to seeing the world truthfully (objectivism). In either case, writing is the result of other activities” (456). But if the writings we read are primarily by a certain class, a certain race, a certain religion, and thus a certain type of life experience and understanding, then a certain ideology will begin to emerge. Thus, excluding others voices not only bars them from entering the conversation and being a part of those “who count” (which allows those who are producing mass literature to speak for those oppressed groups and build a construct, a presentation, rather than a representation), but it limits our understanding of the world around us, and we are privy to a select number of ways of seeing, being, acting, thinking, and so on.
Works Cited
Johnson-Eilola,
Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition.”
Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Michelle
Sidler, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. New York: Bedford/St.
Martin’s, 2007. 454-468.
Keating,
AnnLouise. “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ (De)Constructing ‘Race.’” College
English57 (Dec. 1995): 901-18.
Ohmann, Richard.“Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly capital.” College English 47.7 (1985): 675-689
