Which to Save, Which to Delete: Assembling Literacy Fragments

Through several case studies built from her interviewing people about their literacies and literacy influencers, Deborah Brandt narrates and analyzes representative literacies from at least two different eras in America’s past (“Accumulating Literacy”). As the interviewees describe their literacy sponsors and cultural-material contexts of their literacy development, Brandt extrapolates about literacy practices not only of the interviewees but also the literacy practices of prior generations. Based on her interviews, Brandt concludes that “old” literacies do not die out as new literacies emerge. Instead, the literacies “pile on” (a phrase she uses for the addition of new literacies), creating something akin to literacy remediation. Though this piling on of literacy options suggests wonderful opportunities for new generations’ literacies to flourish, in reality literacies must be negotiated among cultural-material contexts as well as through a winnowing effect I call “[literacy] with fragments”—borrowing from Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Negative Spaces.”

In “English Only” Elaine Richardson argues for recognizing and including the languages of America into conversations about education and public discourse. Though her article is education-centered, she makes a larger claim about literacy writ large: “When a group learns a language, its members make the new language fit, to the extent possible, the group’s epistemological, ontological, and cosmological system” (Richardson 100). From her analysis of what happens when two languages must negotiate a power dynamic we can surmise the result is multivocality. Multivocality is not only represented in education but in larger literacy practices of communities. I argue that the negotiation of present literacies (horizontal) as well as the community’s negotiation of past literacies (vertical) results in an assemblage of literacy, as literacy cannot hold all the prior and all the present literacies simultaneously. Therefore, we have literacy fragmentation and recomposition. This merging “to the extent possible” with existing epistemologies and ontologies, constitutes an assembling of literacy, literacy with fragments. Therefore, communities must ask themselves “Which do we save, and which do we delete?”

Cultural-Material Affordances

Literacy is inextricable from cultural-material forces which enable and perpetuate literacy definitions and access to literacy, according to Richard Ohmann. He defines the development of the term literacy as a substitute and synonym for “cultured” in the late 1800s. Being illiterate meant that one was uncultured, not unable to read. This view of literacy was a top-down pronouncement on lower classes (indeed framed within class) who were assumed to have less capacity for literacy (read also culture, morals, social mobility). With this basis, Ohmann describes monopoly capitalism which dominates much of Western culture. “Technique is less important than context and purpose in the teaching of literacy; and the effects of literacy cannot be isolated from the social relations [cultural-material contexts] and processes within which people become literate” (687). He arrives at critiquing technological determinism and argues that technology will only shape our delivery methods rather than radically transforming human action and social interaction.

Assembling Fragments

Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Negative Spaces” article sees the process paradigm as a flattening mechanism. The process paradigm values the textual production; therefore, the only thing we have added, he argues, is working on individual’s process towards product. We still value/grade the product. Johnson-Eilola presents “writing with fragments” as a possible corrective to our lagging pedagogy and disciplinary agreements on composing. “The shift from production to connection…marks a parallel shift in identity, from internalized to externalized notions of subjectivity,” says Johnson-Eilola (460). Yet, process “phenomena fail to realize connection at a postmodernist level because they continue to focus on the production…rather than the connection between text fragments” (460). Moving towards hypertextual writing with fragments—marked largely with language we would now call assemblage theory, which he argues in Assembling Composition with Selber—deemphasizes product in favor of connecting texts, which is more in keeping with postmodern theories. A pedagogy based on connecting texts is also less colonial, he claims.

Assembling Literacy

If we accept that literacy is gathered from literacy interactions both present (horizontally) and past (vertically) and we accept that we cannot completely imbibe all literacies with which we come into contact, then we understand that literacy is composed of fragments of other literacies that are threaded together. Furthermore, we assemble these fragments into a whole literacy, which is constantly in negotiation with current epistemologies and ontologies, as Richardson reminds us.

Works Cited

Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century.” College English, vol. 57, no. 6, 1995, pp. 649-668.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition.” Computers in the Composition Classroom. Edited by Michelle Sidler, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith, Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 454-468.

Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English, vol. 47, no. 7, 1985, pp. 675-689.

Ramanathan, Vai, and Dwight Atkinson. “Individualism, Academic Writing, and ESL Writers.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 8, no. 1, 1999, pp. 45-75.

Richardson, Elaine. “’English Only,’ African American Contributions to Standardized Communication Structures, and the Potential for Social Transformation.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Edited by Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda, Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 97-112.