Fragmented Literacies: Reshaping How Discourse Operates and Networking Literacy as a Community

Across the texts for this latest exploratory, there were three concerns that were presented as aspects of the community: subjectivity, values, and interaction.

o   Subjectivity: how we identity ourselves and view ourselves as individuals.

o   Values- what social forces from our community shape how we understand literacy.

o   Interaction- The relationship between the individuals’ and the community’s values.

In this turn from literacy to community, we don’t see a turn in the sense that one is left behind or one is valued more than the other—it’s really a shift in view—from literacy as something attained by the individual, to literacy as something learned and practiced within the community. And by viewing literacy through the lens of something communal, then we can start looking at questions of collaboration, authorship, and access. This requires composition and English studies to see literacy as fragments inherent with meaning and reassembled to create new meaning.

As Richard Ohmann states in his essay “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital,” “literacy is an activity of social groups, and a necessary feature of some kinds of social organization” (Ohmann 685). This means that there is no way to take the social out of literacy—it’s inherently intertwined with every social act we do, just as ever social act or community we participate in influences the way we view and practice literacy. Not only that, but a key thing to note is that Ohmann says “literacy is an activity” meaning it’s not something that can just be transferred from one person to the next—it’s not a worn-out sweater. Yet, it’s something that we work with every day, something that we continue to develop and shape depending on how we are looking to operate with it.

On that note, Johndan Johnson-Eilola calls for composition to be viewed as composed of multiple fragments in his text “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition” (458). By doing this, we switch our focus from the product as a whole and from the process as a whole, to both things as bits and pieces. We begin to see how texts work in connection with one another. Johnson-Eilola would argue that each piece carries meaning and this hyperawareness of the pieces of language or material that we’re using allows us as individuals to make a better understanding of meaning. This practice of viewing everything as fragments is not situated solely within composition theory, yet can be transferred to all social acts and other disciplines. The main key is that it operates to help the individual see the meaning inherent in the multiple fragments that make everything. Deborah Brandt’s essay “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the 20^th Century” highlights how literacy is a compilation of previous concepts of literacy and knowledge from familial generations and communities (652). In other words, nothing is new; everything is assembled through the “remotivation of preexisting fragments” (Johnson-Eilola 454).

In breaking down literacy and the way that we practice it into fragments of meaning, we find that our aim—in composition and English studies— is to understand that discourse creates race and begin to investigate how this is and what this ultimately means for the classroom. With discourse being a social act, just as literacy, it too calls for a reconceptualization through a fragmented lens. Discourse comes from the community and the external forces where “whiteness” and “otherness” are created simultaneously in opposition to each other—one cannot be made without the other (Keating 910). A way that composition and English studies can begin to work against the flattening effect that Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes warn against in their text “Flattening Effects: Composition’s Multicultural Imperative and the Problem of Narrative Coherence” is to look at what’s not said, look at what the outliers in the text are and look at the negative spaces in between the words (Johnson-Eilola 462). Everything is made up of fragments—even the English language is multicultural at its roots, and it continues to be redefined through those that use it. It’s not only white heterosexual males that communicate using the English language. And with that understanding, we can better practice literacy as a community.

 - Liana Clarke