My Perspective on Theories & Models of Literacy Class

ENGL B6400 has been the first class I have ever attended focusing on literacy. To me, it has provided an invaluable overview on the development of the alphabet, the diffusion of literate skills, the tensions between orality and literacy, the notion of sponsor linked to the diffusion of literacy, thus the political value of possessing literate skills as linked to the reasons and modalities of diffusion of the alphabet.

As a foreign student of American culture and literature, I have also found this class extremely relevant to have a better, clearer, and in-depth understanding of the American society in regard to concepts such as multiculturalism, race, power relations between groups, cultural tensions. ENGL B6400 has given me very important insights on the complexities of the American society as a postcolonial and neo-colonial reality, where education plays or can play a very important and complex role either in assimilationist or in multicultural directions. Besides, as an Italian, I have found this course inspiring to understand the changes my country is undergoing now that many groups and communities from other countries are coming to work and live in Italy. As I would love to take part to teaching classes to immigrants, I am happy to have been made so aware of the problematic implications of integration through education, and of the importance of encouraging learners to express themselves through literacy, that is, to use literacy in ways that are first and foremost relevant to them. Indeed, my own understanding of literacy as the “true” means to free people has been somehow quenched by placing literacy in context, and valuing it consequently.

Even if I have found meaningful almost all the readings I have done for this class, the most interesting ones have been those on orality vs literacy (Ong, Goody); those on the idea of emergent literacy (Purcell-Gates et al.); and those on multicultural rhetoric. I have also found the idea of the sponsors of literacy (Brandt) extremely helpful in connecting the first part of the course (on the reasons of the diffusion of the alphabet) to the second part of it (on literacy in contemporary America).

I will definitely use the framework of literacy in the States to go on with my literature studies, and I am interested in exploring better the “divide” orality/literacy, which I perceive as a false dichotomy. In respect to the idea of literacy and the web 2.0, I think it is extremely interesting but I need to read more on that, in order to soothe the little bit of scepticism that I have on it. Indeed, discovering that American education is mostly based on writing and does not encourage oral practices a lot at a high school or college level, has made me think that students may also voice their rhetorical practices through more accessible and cheap media as their own voices in the classroom. Yet, the idea of online literacy is deeply valuable because of its hinging on aurality and intertextuality, beside the fact that it implies the need to be conversant with web technologies – I just think educators would want to make sure that web technologies are not mistaken for an end in itself, and keep their status as means to attain critical consciousness.

Final Exam on Theories&Models of Literacy

Here are the links to the essays I wrote for my final. I've focused on the notions of emergent literacy and the great divide theory for my short descriptive essays. I've worked on cultural literacy and multicultural rhetorics for my longer one.

The Sponsors of Literacy

This is the link to my essay on the sponsors of my literacy.

Auralitaly and Web 2.0

While reading Selfe's article on aurality and multimedia composing, I was surprised to learn that it is not a common practice, in English composition classes, to use oral modalities of assessment. I started wondering if it is the same for any junior or high school class: in general, is students' work in the USA assessed mostly through written forms? Are oral forms only limited to class discussions and presentations?

As a kid, I remember reading Shultz's comics, "The Peanuts," where the characters would often participate to elementary schools presentations called "show and tell." In Italy we didn't use to do the same thing; rather, we were assessed on our knowledges both through oral and written tests whose grades would equally bear on the student's final notes. This system worked (and still does) from elementary to high school, and it is largely used in the university as well, both for the humanities and for scientific subjects.

Differently from the States, anyhow, in Italy we are rarely required to interpret on what we study. Of course, the success of an oral test is strictly linked to the degree of naturalness with which a student exposes the chapters or the books s/he has studied: the mastery of the topic is telling of the degree of understanding of the topic itself. Nonetheless, a personal contribution to the study material is not the focus of a form of instruction which is mostly interested in providing the students with a set of notions and concepts. This is true not only at an elementary and high school level, where indeed it can make sense; it is an approach that continues also at the university, at least during the first three years of undergraduate studies.

Still, I admit that I have been largely helped in my writings by the necessity of being persuasive during my oral tests. Preparing an oral test engages the student in the development of a series of strategies which go from the control of anxiety to the understanding of the professor's personality to the exercise of memory and expository skills: it is, by and large, a true rhetorical exercise. What I used to enjoy the most of it, was calibrating the amount of notions that I managed to remember, and my ability to "sell" them in a way that was persuasive enough in respect to my degree of knowledge of the subject. Of course, this trick was easier with Italian or Latin literature, more difficult with history or philosophy, almost impossible with math, biology, or physics. For sure, I as a student was given the possibility of mastering the power attached to what Selfe defines the "enactment of authority, power, and status" (634); yet, this possibility given to students varied greatly according to their character or interest in the subject itself, and not always it was self-empowering.

In the diverse cultural population of American schools and universities, the Web 2.0 seems to be a good means to allow an extensive use of oral and aural tools through processes which empower students by making them used to bring their own voices in a "hierachized" environment. Differently from the Italian high school of the 1990s and 2000s, American high schools have different kinds of hierarchies with which students have to relate: not only are those hierarchies generational, they also are cultural and ethnic. Besides, as Selfe writes, American education is heavily based on writing practices, and on a dissociation of writing from speaking; the Web 2.0 therefore seems to provide an interesting space where to develop and preserve students' power strategies, which range from orality to musicality to use of images and so on. Besides, it allows a kind of engagement that is different and maybe more appealing that the simple working on texts - in this respect, anyway, I do think that it is necessary to include in a Web 2.0 literacy the critical awareness on the contents of a multimodal learning process, in order for the Web 2.0 to be used as a freeing tool, and not as a dumbing big brother.

Internet & Oral Literate Cultures (unmasking the insincerity of the distinction high/low culture)

William's Shimmering Literacies and the last chapters of Brandt's Literacy and Learning focus on a topic which is becoming more and more central in present-day discussions on literacy: the shift of attention from reading to writing.

Brandt explains how the commodification of knowledge has become central to Western market economy: from advertising to user's handbooks to insurance contracts, making contents available to consumers through writing is the sine qua non of a literate market addressed to a largely literate public. Historically, the use of writing developed around the needs of precise sponsors: either the merchant keeping accounts, or the king founding the writers, or the "recent" and disruptive mass-circulation press selling to a growing (and grown) audience. Likewise, nowadays writing is considerably employed (and sponsored) by economic and political activities: the complexification, fragmentation, and burocratization of our societies require an ongoing production of written material, functional to the interaction of the different components of the societies themselves. Through writing, the knowledge which fosters economic, politic, and social changes has been, and is being digested and diffused largely according to the needs of the structures which can benefit from its production: public/private structures which can afford the costs of financing mass written knowledge, or/and structures which have a gain from financing it. In a continuum which links economy to people, literate "labor"’s skills explain and/or sell products; complement the activity of public services; respond to the needs of a mass reading society.

Reading has become instrumental to writing, if such a thing does really make sense (and presently it does). Remunerative writing is basically a working task, to be complied in a more or less programmed way; it (and often its teaching) is promoted and paid because the reading of its content generates gain.

Simultaneously, writing and reading are sponsored by the expanded literate drive of our societies. Consumers of products with user's handbooks, policy holders, book- and magazine-buyers, are the literate us, unemployed, employed, students, workers, immigrants, children, young, adults, elders, everybody. As a largely literate society, we have been mostly, but not only, consumers of/through literate objects. Some things are worth to be said about the different value that writing and reading assume for/are credited by us, according to the moment and time in which we position ourselves in the literate continuum. In her study, Brandt observes that traditionally (that is, in Western XX century, on a mass scale) writing as a skill is taught in dependence to reading (ie.: comprehension tasks at school), and to practical needs, and reading is associated with learning, instruction, top-bottom education; besides that, writing is commonly developed as a private instrument of resistance/vent/self-discovery. But, as Williams's study (and our daily actions) adds, the diffusion of internet and the transformation of mass communication technologies have "massified" other forms of writing use: now, more and more people write to be read, and read to respond and produce more writing.

In her introduction, Williams makes an interesting and useful contextualization of mass popular culture in respect to the transformation of Western societies from largely oral to largely literate ones. Oversimplifying, our popular mass culture is one of many possible developments of a local oral culture -the globalized and commodified one. What is "mass" and "popular" of it, is what is presently shared by people. On this shared culture, as they would do in/with an oral culture, people elaborate and share meaning. In this scenario, the presence of literacy and internet has many consequences: they expand the reach and complexity of voices which participate to a culture which is written/recorded for its means, oral for its modes, and global (as opposed to local and more than national) for its numbers. What about its contents?

I don't have the competence to address the topic of how oral and local cultures helped people to adapt in Western oral societies until the XIX century. As for now, I can refer at least to William's study (but also to my experiences) to say how mass popular culture participates in our lives. Correctly, Williams observes that popular mass culture (namely TV, cinema, music, books, multimedia products) is an important "component" of our leisure time, and it excites many of our passions (he talks about emotions, see chap. 2). Indeed, as an oral culture, mass popular culture is in constant dialogue with our multiple but affine identities, which extract and generate sense from and for it. Not only has internet fostered/amplified the reach of the participants to sharing and sense making-processes, through writing; internet has also made evident a consequence of the diffusion of literacy: "literate" practices of sharing inherited from oral behaviors (indeed natural to humankind) have paralleled "literate" development of the economic and political sphere. Unsurprisingly, it is in these contexts that writing and reading are used to negotiate meanings, acting as strategies of social adaptation through sense-making and consequent decision-making practices.

The questions of high and low culture, academicism and popular mass culture, teaching and self-teaching depend heavily on how the sponsors of literacy envisage the contents of writing and reading in our Western societies. Which sponsor promotes which literacy, in our social continuum(s)? Williams often refers to the disdainful attitude of teachers or professors (of "high culture partisans" in general) in respect to part of popular mass culture. And he rightly points to some obvious characteristic of p.m.c that make it successful (read: appealing or easily-identifiable-with) for the "mass:" 1) the stimulation of involving and strong emotions; 2) its participativeness, which extends the emotions into their communication, generating first-person sense-making, and giving the possibility of "empathetic" sharing. As the "literate" use of internet by younger generations confirms, skills like writing&reading are employed with passion and "success" when used in a situation that is in some way relevant to a person. Nihil novi. The challenge of schools and educators, if they are so concerned with low culture, is to make high culture available to students in ways that allow for personal identification or emotion.

That the academic/literate/educational activities favor rational analysis suppressing emotions is just a sophism: education (as second language classes for adults exemplify; as multicultural approaches to teaching imply) should feed itself of emotive responses, and should teach analytical and critical rationales to elaborate these emotive responses in "productive" ways. An adult who is taught a new language with the purpose of finding a job, doesn't interact immediately with the so called high culture (which is likely not to be the same high culture she has in mind) - therefore, if an emotion different from boredom prevails, this may be for instance the necessity to have access to a job, or a sincere interest in integration/assimilation. A student who reads Harry Potter or who is passionate of The Lord of the Rings, may feel more involved in "high culture" teachings when, for instance, literature and history are taught to her with the appeal that normally characterizes historical, political, literary, social facts when related to the lives of everyday people (another chapter to be dealt with....). In a sense, literacy and education can be effective when they become oral, when they function/are consumed as popular mass culture.

Besides, Williams remarks are extremely interesting in respect to the question of authors/sense-makers and audiences. Again, it is internet to shed light on another crucial implication of mass literacy: the authority of a text (being it written, filmed, performed, etc.) and of the ideas it circulates is more and more associated to "anonymous," common, single individuals; authority is being performed and accepted as a mass prerogative, and is presently undergoing a sort of decentralization. Nonetheless, the knowledge and value systems that literacy contains and spreads are strongly dependent on the systems of knowledge production and release to which I referred in the first paragraphs. These systems inevitably influence the ways in which knowledge and its meanings are circulated. It is precisely this influence that generates "low" and "high" cultures, and defines the terms in which content and modes of low and high cultures interact.

Internet can suggest educators and people in general how to adapt themselves to society, or how to adapt society to themselves. The decentralization of authority in meaning-(re)production is a hint. Another hint can be the leveling of the roles of writing and reading.

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, 2009.

Williams, Bronwyn T. Shimmering Literacies: Popular Culture & Reading & Writing Online. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.

The Class as the Polis, plus Metics, Slaves, and Women

Although I do not have any experience with yearbook writing, which is not a common practice in Italy, I have found in Finders's chapters some interesting matches with my own thoughts in respect to text analysis, identity formation, and reproduction of the status quo within and through the school system.
As far as I have understood, Finders suggests that the yearbook perpetuates power tensions and power relationships among teenagers precisely because students are not pushed by their literacy activities to challenge the power structure internal to their own groups and gangs. The lack of critical awareness of one's positioning within the class is due to the tendency of transforming the class and the school in a "safe environment" where an unproblematized expression of the self (for example through free reading or writing choices) is preferred to debates around why every single student's self is expressed through particular choices and behaviors. Therefore, an uncritical centering on the teenager's independence is likely to lead to a perpetuation of social discourses that, entering the school through the different students' identities, re-enact the power relations existing outside the school, and these relations are consequently maintained through the years, making school an environment unable to fully articulate a project of social change.

All this makes very much sense. I think that the focus it drives on literacy and language is very up to the point and powerful; in a way, Finders's argument points to the often overlooked complex value of literacy and literary products, that goes well beyond the mere aspect of providing people with a technology (in the case of literacy) and with a set of notions (in the case of literary products). In my opinion, commonsensical understanding of literacy and of the humanities tends to place literacy in relation to the basic skills needed to (economically) succeed in society, and the humanities (as understood in high school and, I'm afraid to say, also in college and university) in relation to some form of high culture leisure. In the high school (and I do not think there are real differences between the States and Italy), these discourses on literacy and literature apply in that literacy is understood as a taken-for-granted set of abilities, and literature is understood as a craft that students should be able to aesthetically decode and historically position: most of the time, superficial factual knowledge. Among the various consequences of this, there is the risk of alienating students from the powerful role that language and texts have in the formation or confirmation of social and individual values, roles, attitudes, and so on. Besides, this traditional and commonsensical approach to literacy is doomed to perpetuate unresolved political issues linked to present-day globalized and culturally mixed scholastic environments.

In Italy, the structure of the high school (that students attend from the age of 13 to the age of 18) is completely different from the American one. And so is the student population, which now has probably already changed from when I was attending my last year, 5 years ago, as the presence of student of non-Italian descent is becoming higher. Nonetheless I'm reading all those papers on multi-cultural (i'd rather say identity-shifting) education as extremely powerful insights on educational and integrationist issues that exist in every context in which class, gender, racial or cultural tensions are experienced and enacted. For sure, a teenager environment is one of these contexts, and a critical one as far as identity-construction is concerned. The idea of using literacy and literature/text analysis to create a practice of discourse-awareness and discourse-debunking (or at least critique) is, in my opinion, truly exciting in that it can prove very engaging for students, and truly useful for society itself, as it may fulfill what I consider the main aims of education: critical ability, and self-empowerment through community (-ies) empowerment. In this respect, the role of the teacher may become even more central and engaging (and difficult..) than it already is, as s/he may be required to function both as debate-generator and debate-regulator, focusing on the importance of formulating the clash within the class, in order to overcome it outside the class in the long run.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polis

Literacy and Mythocracy - a Response to Hirsch's Paper

Hirsch's argument on cultural literacy is very up-to-the-point in many different ways. I will focus on the paradoxical and contradictory nature of some of his remarks, as far as I have understood them; I would argue that it is precisely the paradox and contradiction of the text that make it valuable to understand what is at stake talking of literacy and society nowadays, in the States and beyond.

What Hirsch intends for cultural literacy is, in my opinion, nothing more than the concrete outpour/contemporary version of a mythical identification, something that the writer really longs for his society, and something that he feels the States lack. His continuous references to a common and shared background on which people would not really need to have a precise grasp, but that in some ways should pave and direct their understanding of society and of social goals, suggest that the role he envisages for the literate person is that of actor in a reality which has a somewhat accidental bias, directed only by some sort of universal commonsense which would only benefit from a shared set of symbols and values. Therefore, the access and the internalization of those values are what allow every individual to take part in the life of his or her society – which is quite obvious. In the case of a literate society, the ability to read or discuss topics linked to a written practice, and the means to decode these topics from a cultural perspective, are directly linked to the access of the individual to self-determination and self-assertiveness.

The problem arises when discussions on what should characterize this cultural (I would call it mythical) literacy come along. I think that Hirsch's instances of mythical sense-making practices are completely inconsistent with the standpoint from which he writes – that of an “out-of-many-one” scholar: traditional societies in which oral or written practices allow to maintain a shared cultural background avoiding much debate are societies that have not been built upon colonial and oppressive practices while simultaneously developing high levels of literacy and analytical sense. The idea of providing the States with a cultural literacy which is not controversial and highly debatable is simply absurd, as it is confirmed, in my opinion, with the reference to The Black Panther journal – I guess that, if asked what to add in a history or philosopical curriculum for the schools, the folks of The Black Panther would have suggested to study the premises and implications of slavery besides the Declaration of Independence. Not to talk about indigenous people, who maybe would have liked to have a go in respect to ideas of what Hirsch defines as “thriving creature” (31). Hirsch is correct in observing that “there is a pressing need for clarity about our educational priorities,” (25) indeed the core of the question is precisely there. What is education meant for? Challenge of the status quo? Well, if so, the mythical discourse of the States (as well as that of many other state-nations) should develop around imbalanced power, race, and class relations, which have lead to imbalanced distribution of richness and of access to resources and decision-making to produce richness, and I guess that in that case students would feel so much involved and challenged by the relevance of the notions and concepts they are studying, that there would be no risk of cultural illiteracy at all (maybe young people tend to forget the dates of the Reconstruction because it is not very clear to them how this superficial factual knowledge could in anyway affect their lives or toughts... which is telling on how our generations have been largely educated with de-contextualized , or "de-narrativized"and therefore useless notions).

I have the feeling that every literary, historical, maybe even geographical canon is the result of more or less conscious ideological practices, and this has become more and more evident with the democratization of the access to literacy. There is no accident, as Hirsch seems to imply, in the process of mythicization of the symbols which characterize a society; varying from society to society, in space and time (and in the dimension of the society), the myths are created, replicated, or destroyed according to the needs of the society itself, and the more complex (big, numerous, multi-mythical) the society, more complex and controversial it is to define its myths– or, in our case, its discursive structures or a cultural literacies. It seems to me that choosing one out of many may just serve the purpose of making infinite debates arise as a consequence ; which yet is useful, as the scholar and academic debate within the States already contains in itself the seed of a possible mythocracy for the country.

On Literacy and Separation (Response to Ong's Article)

I have found Ong’s analysis of language and separation very interesting and inspiring. I think it could be valuable to inquire into how the separation provoked by writing is (more or less unconsciously) exploited in today’s relationships between literates, illiterates, and their societies; and in the value attached to literacy and to illiteracy by industrialized and literate societies. I sketch some thoughts which are flawed by the common sense and generalizations I criticize in the end of the post.

Ong observes that writing “[distances] the word from the plenum of existence” and therefore “enforces verbal precision of a sort unavailable in oral cultures;” (26) he also writes that, by separating “the known from the knower,” writing “promotes “objectivity”” (24) and consequently “[creates] a state of mind in which knowledge itself can be thought of as an object;” (25) the actual reason for which writing may be considered objective is, rather, that it allows separation of “interpretation from data,” (25) and that it also allows for analytical and ultimately abstract processing of the data at hand. The subsequent “verbal precision” has become part of the “chirographically thinking and speaking human beings,” (19) and it has been paralleled by the attribution of a value of objectivity to all the practices processed through writing or reading. Besides, the more those practices are linked either to academic or to administrative spheres, the more objective and authoritative they are considered. Conversely, administrative and academic practices are considered authoritative for their reliance on writing.

My feeling is that this mechanism produces commonsensical conceptions of writing which oppose literates and illiterates in at least two problematic ways. First of all, mainly oral cultures may be downgraded and silenced in reason of their not being competitive in present-day configuration of administration and economic structuring; that is, they may only be evaluated in respect to the parameters of a mainly writing culture, rather than being considered as dialoguing partners of a cultural exchange of strategies. Secondly, in mainly writing cultures literacy tends to be associated too much to more or less socially-rewarded positions and decently- or well-paid jobs; education as the scope of literacy seems therefore to be too functional to the insertion of the person in a ready-made working reality, on whose oscillations the possibilities of working and the scopes of literacy depend; common sense interprets this mechanism by associating illiteracy to social and economic failure, and this does not help to reposition literacy (and social roles) in competition and in dialogue with the economic structure. Literate people are oftentimes either employed or grown as “skilled labor,” and literacy is judged consequently. I guess the reason is that the enhancing possibilities of literacy do not find the place they expect in some of our writing cultures and societies. I have the impression than this place is to be found precisely in the oral dimension, diminishing or at least reshaping the separation which now exists between literate and illiterate. Which of course will imply a rethinking of what being literate/illiterate means.

Workshop at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Medieval manuscripts from the IX century onwards are repositories of the evolutions in the evaluation and use of the written language in Europe. In the introduction to his study Space Beween Words, Paul Saenger reports that “[in] the West, the ability to read silently is a result of the historical evolution of word separation that [began] in the seventh century;”¹the manuscripts kept in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the Columbia University allow to follow how long it took to this separation to come along, and under what pressures it took place. Allowing to assess the progressive changes that lead to a different balance between oral and written culture, they suggest the evolution of a different conception of the notion of literacy, and a parallel evolution of controlling means to check the impact of a diffused literacy.

One of the most remarkable differences between ancient and contemporary texts is the way in which a written text used to be structured in Classical time and in the Middle Ages. Saenger reports that the adoption of vowels in Greek written alphabet provided “a complete set of signs for the unambiguous transcription of pronounced speech,” (Saenger 9) and that this exhaustive symbology allowed to record spoken acts as fluxes of letters whose discrete elements where not represented by spaces between words, punctuation, or any other textual clue, but only by the very presence of vowels; this scriptura continua was meant to be read out lout, and the performance relied on the reader's good knowledge of the text at hand. The logic that underlaid this seemingly impractical writing system uncovers what Saenger identifies as the concrete “advantage[s]” (Saenger 11) for the ancients, linked to rooted linguistic behaviors: the obviousness of a limited access to reading decoding abilities and the reliance on oral diffusion of contents; the existence of a limited number of contents that could be meaningful for the large public; an unchallenged elitist conception of culture. These elements were part of an approach to literacy that excluded the possibility of silent and individual reading, and the approach itself was strongly influenced by the media available to diffuse content: ancient texts were mostly recorded on fragile papyrus, either used in scrolls or codices, and papyrus did not prove practical enough to encourage or justify a different organization of writing and reading practices.

The manuscripts of the Middle Ages bear witness of a tension between these deep-seated habits and the changes that took place in the modes, instruments, and practices of literacy. Manuscripts form France, Italy, Germany, and England, ranging from the IX to the XV century were realized on leaves of parchment, treated animal skin that was more practical and easier to handle and organize than papyrus. Until XIII century, the realization of manuscripts was prerogative of the monasteries, where the scribes would copy religious texts as the Bible, theological and exegetical documents, Psalters and missals. Even though the writing continued to be strongly influenced by the traditional patterns of the scriptura continua, some clues for deciphering started to appear: one of the documents of the Columbia Library, an ancient codex form the late IX century, presents some red 'annotations' that seem to gloss the text in order to facilitate its reading; moreover, two scraps of a X century Bible show that grouping grammatical units was spreading as a practice of writing. Nonetheless, the extreme slowness of these changes reflected a still strongly limited access to the written text, that continued to be an instrument available only to the high spheres of society, interested in a controlled production and impartation of sense, meaning, and culture.

After the XIII century, manuscripts began to be produced also outside monasteries; some of the exemplars of the Library show that the new public was composed by wealthy people, in large part the nobility, and some representatives of the in-the-making merchant class. In this period the hornbooks, used to teach reading to children, began to appear, and also small personalized learning books, containing the alphabet and some well known prayers. From this time on, silent reading evidently gained more and more ground, and with it the writing strategies changed, word separation being progressively employed also outside Ireland, where the scribes had adopted it in the early Middle Ages (Manguel, Saenger). With the diffusion of literacy, many examples of individual note books can be found, and their content is telling in respect to which strata of society literacy reached: commonplace books or recipe books are two of the example that point at the merchant class as the new sector of society form whom literacy represented a tool and a weapon.

The document written under the command, but not by the hand of Philip Augustus in 1207, is telling of the ancient widespread conception of the writing tool as a subordinate instrument, and of the status of the people who could master this tool as mere laborers serving a cause on which they could not nor were supposed to participate. However, this trend began to change with the diffusion of schooling and of a more intimate perusal of the written text, that contributed to the development of written awareness among an increasing number of people. It would be interesting to assess how the notion of authenticity, that will be pivotal after the invention of printing, started to develop during these first stages of written awareness, and in which sense it influenced the value of literacy. I would also like to see how the issue of authenticity, linked to that of authorial rights, proved to be a powerful mean to restrain the revolutionary access to and diffusion of the written word once this was freed by extra-monasteries production, printing, and widespread literacy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996.

Saenger, Paul. Spaces Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Standford: Standford University Press, 1997.

Discussion Forum: A History of Reading Chs. 1 & 2 by Alberto Manguel

I have a couple of thoughts to share in respect to Manguel’s “The Silent Reader,” and I’ll start by quoting him when he writes: “following the teachings of Aristotle, [Augustine] knew that letters, “invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent”, were “signs of sounds” and these in turn were “signs of things we think.”(45) The idea of the written text as capable of conversing with its reader is quite a curious one for me; of course the text keeps alive and brings far words of its absent creator, but a text does not allow questioning and may frustrate any need of answer on the doubts its generates. So I have thought how much, back in the days of oral riding (talking about Europe), more than the necessity of questioning a text there was the necessity of performing it, at least to the general audience to whom this text would provide meanings, symbols, and a certain form of understanding.

Therefore, I’ve started thinking a little bit about performing a written text, and I’ve reflected on my very way of reading and understanding a text as a silent reader. I’ve noticed that sometimes while reading some complicate sentences not only do I read them out loud, but I accompany my reading with gestures that I would probably make while explaining what I am reading to a possible audience (I’m my audience, in that context. Not that I generally have any kind of audience, by the way) – these are gestures which generally go with oral expression, speech. I remember attending a linguistic class last year, and the professor gave us some hints in respect to gestures and speech, explaining that oral expression needs fewer words than written expression does, as it complements itself with gestures and interactions with the environment. These gestures are considered to serve as aids to the expression of thoughts, both abstract and concrete, and range from very individual to very codified ones. So, reading a sentence like “the reader had the duty to […] allow [words] to become […] verba, spoken words – spirit” (45) I’ve started wondering how much the performative act of reading out loud a text would imply a form of literacy: either from the public, in respect to codified gestures of the reader (which could help to get a certain commentary on the read material), or from the readers, who could maybe find in gestures a strategy to better remember how to read/perform a certain text written in scriptura continua. It would not come as a surprise that such an handy tool as gesture was used both for remembering ( = easily reading) and for connoting a text; it would not surprise neither that an audience could get more out of a reading if it (it? I mean the audience) could properly interpret the gestures and grimaces of the reader. If they didn’t gesture at all, this would not surprise me as well, because for instance my granddad didn’t use to gesture when he read me Collodi’s Pinocchio. But he did a lot of grimaces, changed voice, the text had spaces and capital letters, and he was holding me on his legs and the book in his arms so it would have been pretty complicated.