JAC Volume 14 Issue 1

The Insistence of the Letter: Literacy Studies and Curriculum Theorizing, ed. Bill Green (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993, 233 pages).

Book Review by Jay David Bolter, Georgia Institute of Technology

This collection of essays applies recent literary and cultural theory to the study of the curriculum. The contributors show how Derrida and other poststructuralists and postmoderns can lead us to reexamine the place of reading and writing in education. The collection is appearing in the United States as part of the Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. The list of titles or subtitles in that series reflects a web of related concerns: Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness; Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition; Eating on the Street: Teaching Literacy in a Multicultural Society; Knowledge, Culture, and Power: International Perspectives on Literacy as Policy and Practice. There is no denying the importance of this trend. Deconstruction, gender theory, various forms of social construction, and cultural studies form a network of assumptions, and these assumptions and their attendant rhetoric are moving rapidly through the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.

All of the essays in The Insistence of the Letter make clear contributions to its postmodern agenda. In fact, for a book on postmodernism, this collection is almost embrrassingly well organized. The contributors share a vision of change that is articulated by the editor, Bill Green, both in his Introduction and in the final essay "Literacy Studies and Curriculum Theorizing." The final essay is an effective summary of the issues raised throughout the volume and could well stand on its own. Of the other ten essays, six are historical. In addition to postmodern sources, these essays draw on such historians of literacy as Ong, Havelock, and Goody. Pieces by William A. Reid and Keith Hoskin discuss the development of literacy and alphabetic culture. Hoskin juxtaposes Walter Ong's argument about the importance of the alphabet with Derrida's very different reading of the Greek attitude toward writing. The next four essays treat the history of the teaching of English (primarily in England and Australia) from the seventeenth century to the present. These are well-grounded historical studies. Most of them are also implicit contributions to a political theme: that the system of education served in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to promote the reigning ideology--that is, to educate the working class in a way appropriate to its subordinate political and social status. The remaining essays explore various contemporary manifestations of literacy as ideology. James Donald criticizes E.D. Hirsch and others for the "progressive" view that traditional literacy will enable the disenfranchised to participate fully in a democratic culture. Allan Luke examines the "micropolitics" of the Australian classroom and finds that a typical teacher is still following the traditional paradigm of teacher as authority. Another essay is a gender study of television's impact on rural Australian families. (Surprisingly, this is the only essay that explicitly deals with gender, although gender studies are central to postmodern theory.) The only essay that seems somewhat out of step is one by Colin Lankshear, who suggests a pedagogical model for reading and writing based upon "entrepreneurship," a term that has a dangerously capitalist ring.

Although committedly postmodern, this collection is not radical by current American and European standards. It does not offer the nihilistic vision of Baudrillard or Vattimo. And in some sense the contributors are fighting a battle that has already been won. The enemy in Green's closing essay is the modernist notion of literacy: "the nexus between language and rationality in modernist schooling." Green contends that "analytical rationality" has been the "hallmark of modernist culture and schooling." Other forms of human knowledge production and communication have been ignored, such as ways of knowing that are holistic and embodied and depend upon affect as well as cognition. Here Green is simply applying to the realm of education the familiar postmodern critique of Cartesian reason. But are there any compelling theorists in the social sciences or humanities who have not already accepted this critique, either overtly or tacitly? Who defends Cartesian analysis? Everyone seems today to be writing about the role of affect, the materiality of language, social construction (of the classroom, the workplace, or the laboratory), and so on. Green and his colleagues are probably right to suggest that modernist assumptions persist in the practice of many teachers and in many curricula. But even at this practical level, the new rhetoric and the new assumptions are already having an effect. In the endless popular debate over school reform (at least in the United States), no one defends memorization of facts or the presentation of knowledge in rigid Cartesian hierarchies. Even a conservative critic such as E.D. Hirsch is in fact a tacit social constructionist: Hirsch is simply arguing that all students need to be socialized in the shared world of verbal ideas that our culture has defined for itself.

Computer technology is hardly mentioned in this book, perhaps because it is being introduced more rapidly into American classrooms than into English and Australian ones. Ironically, the computer is helping to redefine literacy in ways of which Green would approve. With its graphic user interface and its playful deconstruction of linear texts, the computer is introducing students to a hybrid literacy that combines alphabetic writing with graphics and even video. Thirty years ago, the computer seemed to be the ultimate Cartesian reasoning machine, but it too can be socially constructed and may yet prove to be a potent agent of postmodern change in the classroom.

Most of the contributors to this volume hold academic positions in the United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand. Their experience of the curriculum and of literacy may therefore be somewhat different from the experience of scholars in the United States. It may be, for example, that the United Kingdom is still more committed to traditional literacy than is the United States. In any case, the theoretical foundations for these essays come as much from French and American as from British sources. The essays speak what is becoming an international language of the postmodern, and, whatever its ultimate fate, this is the language that will define the humanities and social sciences in the near future. The contributors to this volume are right to argue that we are in the midst of a significant cultural change: we are redefining how and what we teach under the rubric of literacy. The letter (or alphabetic literacy) is losing some of the educational status that it has enjoyed in the last two-hundred years.