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Content PROMISES AND POWER:
MYTHS OF THE ACQUISITION OF LITERACY
by
Shirley K Rose
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
December 1984
UMI Num ber: D P23099
All rights reserved
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CAUFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CAUFORNIA 90089
This dissertation, w ritten by
SHIRLEY K ROSE
under the direction of h.zr. D issertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents fo r the degree of
D O C T O R OF PH ILOSOPH Y
Dean
D ate September 4, 1984
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their contributions to the conception of this
work, I thank the members of my scholarly community; and
for their contributions to its completion, I thank the
staff of the Word Processing Center at the University of
Southern California School of Business. Special thanks go
to the members of my dissertation committee, each of whom
gave me just the kind of guidance I needed at just the
right time; to faculty and students in the Rhetoric,
Linguistics and Literature program in the English
Department at the University of Southern California, who
participate in an ongoing intellectual and professional
conversation; and to my family and friends who have asked
to read what I have written.
i
I
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER ONE: MYTHS OF THE ACQUISITION OF LITERACY 1
CHAPTER TWO: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES AS FICTIONS
AND FICTIONS AS TRUTH 21
CHAPTER THREE: THE MYTH OF LITERACY FOR AUTONOMY IN
FIVE PUBLISHED AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 62
CHAPTER FOUR: THE MYTH OF SCHOOLING FOR LITERACY IN
FOUR STUDENT NARRATIVES 106
EPILOGUE: PROMISES AND POWER 135
BIBLIOGRAPHY 142
APPENDIX A 160
APPENDIX B 174
iii
Chapter One: Myths of the Acquisition of Literacy
Two separate but related myths are the source of a
great many of our notions about literacy. The first is that
a literate person has greater autonomy and power than an
illiterate person. The second is that acquisition of
literacy is the result of instruction in literacy. (I am
using here Mark Schorer's definition of myth: "A myth is a
large, controlling image that gives philosophical meaning to
the facts of ordinary life; that is, which has organizing
value for experience."1)
My primary aim in this work is to examine the way the
first of these myths, the myth that autonomy is a
consequence of literacy, is represented in autobiographical
narratives of the acquisition of literacy written both by
professional writers and by student writers.
Of secondary interest will be an analysis of these same
narratives for their representation of the second myth, the
myth that schooling is the means of acquiring literacy.
This first chapter offers a brief review of theory and
research on the acquisition of literacy and the consequences
of literacy. The second chapter sets out the theoretical
apology for my use of autobiographical narratives as a
1
source of-insTgEt and~lohder standing for lTtTeracy researcET~
Chapter Three proposes a recursive model of the acquisition
of literacy, based on my analysis of five published
autobiographies. Chapter Four provides close analysis of.
four student narratives for their representation of what I
believe are two factors of student motivation for learning
to read and write: their perceptions of themselves as
powerful and their assumptions regarding the importance of
instruction to becoming literate. My conclusion will
briefly discuss relationships between the myths of literacy
for autonomy and schooling for literacy and the implications
of their apparent conflict in some literacy acquisition
situations.
Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including
educational psychologists, cognitive theorists,
sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and composing
process researchers have done extensive research into the
processes involved in acquiring language and reading and
writing skills. My purpose here is not to give a
comprehensive review of literacy research in these
disciplines in which it is carried out and applied. Rather
I will give a very general outline of those strands of
research which are relevant to my purpose of establishing
that the beliefs that literacy leads to power and that
schooling leads to literacy are almost universally held and
seldom questioned assumptions.
2
The deilnTEion of-literacy wluTcIT_I"^wiTr_be using here
is limited to reading and writing of words--what is loosely
called print literacy, though it includes computerized
word-processing wherein some texts never take a paper and
ink form. I will not be addressing the literacies of other
symbolic media such as film, television, and computers.
Patricia Greenfield has examined similarities and
differences between print literacy and literacies for these
other media in her recent book Mind and Media: Effects of
Television, Video Games, and Computers. And Marshall
McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, first published in 1962,
continues to be an important work on the functions of
various media in our culture.
Definitions and philosophies of literacy are as diverse
as are definitions and philosophies of education. And as is
the case with education theory and research, literacy theory
and research may be divided into two general categories: one
which proposes that the ideal use of literacy is the
development of the individual for herself, and one which
proposes that the purpose of literacy is to develop a
well-organized smoothly functioning society. The two
categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive, yet they
do suggest a difference in perspectives on the relationship
between literacy and power and will serve to organize my
discussion in this chapter. Few if any literacy
3
researchers orHiheorilFts seem to doubt-that literacy " has a
positive value.2
In the remainder of this chapter, I will briefly sketch
out the ways these two perspectives on literacy have
determined and informed the reasons people have for valuing
literacy, theory of and research into the acquisition of
literacy, and theory of and research into the consequences
of literacy.
Some literacy researchers have defined literacy as
merely a technology. John Oxenham calls it a "code of a
code, a visual representation of an oral/aural means of
communication, language" (40). He further characterizes
literacy as "simply a means of embodying language in a
visual form" (19).
Other researchers and theorists have taken quite a
different approach, identifying literacy as a consciousness
or mental state.
Stated at their extremes, these two views of literacy
are (a) as a tool, literacy is merely a way of doing, and
(b) as a kind of consciousness, literacy is simply a way of
thinking or a set of cognitive strategies. The first view
has the advantage of making literacy seem value-free; the
second has the advantage of being generally applicable to
nearly any positive (or at least familiar) value, such as
"critical thinking" or "logic," for any particular
researcher or theorist.
4
A more useful definition of literacy strikes a balance
between these two extremes, recognizing, as does Kenneth
Burke, that language is as much a creator of reality as it
is a reflection of reality. In Kenneth Burke's definition,
man is "the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol misusing)
animal" (LASA, 16). One of his definitions of language is
that "Language is a species of action, symbolic action--and
its nature is such that it can be used as a tool" -- but it
is much more than that, just as sticks and stones are more^
than weapons (15).
Walter Ong assumes a similar position in Orality and
Literacy, noting that writing is a technology, for it calls
for the use of tools and other equipment, £nd reminding his
readers that "Technologies are artificial, but--paradox
again--artificiality is natural to human beings" (82/83).
Ong's point is that literacy, as a technology, is not only
an exterior aid but also the agent of interior
transformations of consciousness. He defines literate human
beings as:
beings whose thought processes do not grow out of
simply natural powers as structured, directly or
indirectly, by the technology of writing. Without
writing the literate mind would not and could not
think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but
normally even when it is composing its thought in oral
form. More than any other single invention, writing
has transformed human consciousness (78) .
Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole's definition of
literacy parallels Dell Hymes1 definition of communicative
5
competence: Literacy is not simpIy~knowing how to read and~
write a particular script but applying this knowledge for
specific purposes in specific contexts of use (Psychology
of Literacy).
In "Education as the Practice of Freedom," Paulo Friere
distinguishes adaptation and integration. Integration is
the ability to be a creator of culture rather than to be
subject to it. Friere views literacy as not just a
technology, but a creator of culture. Elsewhere, Friere has
contended that "technique itself as an instrument of men in
their orientation in the world is not neutral" ("Adult
Literacy Process," 364). That is, literacy is not merely a
means of getting along and adapting to a society's norms,
but a force for adapting the society to oneself.
Although Friere does not make a clear distinction
between education and literacy, his characterization of the
differences between "banking education" and "problem posing
education" in Pedagogy of the Oppressed elaborates this view
of the reason for literacy:
Banking education (for obvious reasons) attempts, by
mythicizing reality, to conceal certain facts which
explain the way men exist in the world; problem-posing
education sets itself the task of demythologizing.
Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing
education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act
of cognition which unveils reality. Banking education
treats students as objects of assistance;
problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers.
Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates
(although it cannot completely destroy) the
intentionality of consciousness by isolating
consciousness from the world, thereby denying men their
ontological and historical vocation of becoming more
6
fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on
creativity and stimulates true reflection and action
upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of men
as beings who are authentic only when engaged in
inquiry and creative transformation. In sum: banking
theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating
forces, fail to acknowledge men as historical beings;
problem-posing theory and practice take man's
historicity as their starting point (71) .
Exploring the question "What explains the present
general concern for literacy (and education)?" in Literacy:
Writing, Reading and Social Organization, John Oxenham has
provided an eleven-page narrative developing the point that
"Over the past four centuries a variety of needs and
pressures have been gathering force to require that most
people in most of today's societies should be schooled and
literate to at least some degree" (8). The forces he
identifies are commerce, technology, government, politics,
religion and culture (13) .
Oxenham identifies two main reasons education and
literacy are perceived to be important: their power to
transform the individual and allow him greater autonomy and
their power to transform a society's socio-economic
structure and speed its development. The first is a reason
for gaining literacy for oneself. The second is a reason
for spreading literacy to others. For some individuals in
some societies, these goals have conflicted; others have
found them to be mutually interdependent. As Oxenham puts
it:
7
The outcomes of the traciing over prioritfies between
public interests and private demands have largely been
that the higher levels of schooling (and universities)
have captured disproportionate shares of the resources
to hand; and the areas where the need for literacy has
not been acute or the demand for literacy not vocally
effective have tended to remain illiterate, either
through being denied access to schools and special
programmes, or through substantial rates of dropout
from them. Hence it is that the poor, the rural, the
politically less active and the women remain prominent
in the statistics of illiteracy (17/18).
Schooling, education and literacy acquisition, when
distinguished at all, have generally been believed to have
an essential and intimate relationship. Until recently,
many have assumed that literacy acquisition takes place in
school, perhaps because literacy instruction takes place
there. It has also been assumed that students' literacy
acquisition is one of the goals of schooling. A common
concern focussing the more recent research in many of these
disciplines is the connection between schooling and
literacy.
Indicative of this new interest is the research
reported in a collection of papers which were the subject of
the University of Victoria Symposium on Children's Response
to a Literate Environment: Literacy Before Schooling. The
conference focussed on how children may acquire literacy
before they encounter institutional schooling. These papers
have been revised and published as Awakening to Literacy,
edited by Hillel Goelman, Antoinette A. Oberg, and Frank
Smith.
8
THTs and other acquisition of literacy research and
theory can be divided into two general categories: that
which stresses literacy and' cognition and that stressing
literacy and culture.
The cognitive research focusses on the acquisition
process, positing universal cognitive developmental stages
through which a learner passes. Movement from one to the
next of these stages is seen both to affect and to be
affected by the acquisition of literacy. The purpose of
these studies is usually to find similarities across diverse
groups then, implicitly, to develop instructional techniques
which best exploit and enhance this development. Included
in this research is that by John Read on the development of
creative spelling by children, Emilia Ferreiro and Ana
Tebrosky questioning the correlation between factors of
success on IQ tests and literacy skills, David R. Olson on
the kinds of talk about language that goes on in literate
homes, and Jerome Bruner on the connection between learning
both spoken and written language through creative
story-telling and experiencing. (Essays by Ferreiro and
Tebrosky, Olson, and Bruner are included in Awakening to
Literacy.)
The literacy and culture research stresses the social
context of acquisition of literacy. The emphasis in this
research tends to be on showing important differences in
cultural values and purposes which not only affect
9
acguilsTtTon of ITteracy, but aTso determine "discourse
strategies. Representative of this socio-cultural research
in literacy acquisition is the work of Michael Stubbs
("Initial Literacy"), Jenny Cook-Gumperz and John Gumperz
("Transition to Literacy"), Bambi Schiefflin and Marilyn
Cochran-Smith, Alonzo Anderson and Shelley J. Stokes, and
Hope Jenson Leichter. (Reports on the work of Schieffelin
and Cochran-Smith, Anderson and Stokes, and Leichter are
included in Awakening to Literacy.)
Michael Stubbs discusses the confusion of the "inherent
value" of literacy and the social value of literacy.
Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz's research suggests that the
definition of literacy has been too narrowly confined to the
acquisition of certain communicative strategies, such as
precision in usage, decontextualization of information and
careful weighing of words and that this narrow definition
has ignored the more general socio-historical forms of
literacy apparent in its use in the context of a variety of
social roles.
Schieffelin and Cochran-Smith's work on acquisition of
literacy has included observation of Chinese immigrant
families where the children are often responsible for
teaching a new literacy to older family members. Their work
is of special interest here in regard to the nature of the
power roles in the situation they describe.
10
Among literacy theorists^ Cl aude Lev i “ - ” S t r au s s has
claimed that it is literacy that separates primitive
societies from civilized societies ("'Primitive' and
'civilized' peoples: A conversation with Claude
Levi-Strauss.")
Jack Goody, reacting to cultural relativism prevalent
in sociological and anthropological studies, also has
insisted that there are differences in literate and
non-literate societies (Domestication of the Savage Mind).
While he would discard the value-laden distinctions of
primitive/civilized, hot/cold, developed/underdeveloped
cultures, he insists that the presence or prevalence of a
literate group has an effect on the social organization of
the society--as a result of certain cognitive consequences
of that literacy.
Some of the distinguishing features by which Goody
identifies a literate society include decontextualization of
discourse, or elements of discourse,' the amount of
imagination required of a writer/reader in understanding
discourse, the degree of hypothesizing necessary to
accomplish cognitive tasks, and the ability to
"fictionalize" in the sense of constructing an audience or
constructing an author, as in Walter Ong's essay "The
Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction" and Michel Foucault's
notion of "fictionalized author" expounded in The Order of
Things. -Besides these differences in degree of "perspective
11
taking" which a member of a literate culture is able to do,
Goody sees differences in the literate person's and the
non-literate person's ability to think abstractly or to use
logic to arrive at conclusions rather than to use
observation or experience to gain information.
In an earlier essay, "The Consequences of Literacy,"
Jack Goody and Ian Watt named what they had observed and
presumed to be some cultural consequences of literacy.
Among these are the rise of an elite group, a tendency
toward permanence of ideas, greater desire for privacy and
sense of individualism, and greater impersonalization in
social relationships.
When a society develops a writing system, skill in
writing and reading is not universal. The literate register
is controlled by one group in society, so literacy becomes a
political phenomenon. Once literacy enters into a society,
ideas can be recorded and preserved. The result of this is
often that these ideas are allowed to change less. Because
the rise of alphabetic literacy coincided with the
development of history and logic disciplines, Goody
hypothesizes that it was a precursor and precondition. The
permanency of written language made possible systematic
comparisons of sets of statements as in a comparison of the
past with the present in historical criticism and in
syllogisms.
12
Because literacy a Flows communication with the self
through diaries, notes, and poetry, interpersonal
interaction becomes less necessary. Goody and Watt claim
the novel, which participates in the
autobiographical and confessional direction of such
•writers as St. Augustine, Pepys, and Rousseau, and
purports to portray the inner as well as the outer life
of individuals in the real world, has replaced the
collective representation of myth and epic (346).
And because it is possible to write letters, send memos, and
so forth, instead of talking face to face, literacy promotes
bureaucracy.
Ron and Susan Scollon's research among Athabaskan
Indians, reported in Narrative and Face in Interethnic
Communication, has led them to conclusions which support
Goody's general hypothesis (Domestication of the Savage
Mind) but challenge his underlying assumption that the
transition from a context-based communication (pre-literate)
to a decontextualized communication is a transition for the
better. Scollon and Scollon point out that the properties
Olson ("The Language of Instruction"), Cook-Gumperz and
Gumperz ("The Transition to Literacy"), and Goody attribute
to literacy (decontextualization through fictionalization of
authorship and of readership; and decontextualization
through internal cohesion of the information structure) are
really only a particular kind of literacy: "essayist
literacy." Scollon and Scollon found that among the
13
Athabaskan Indians, acquiring literacy corresponded"~~to or
brought about a change in ethnicity. Among the Athabaskans,
certain discourse patterns lead to conversational inferences
which are different from the inferences resulting from use
of the same discourse patterns in English.
Some of the differences in these two cultures' social
interpretation of discourse were: how the self is presented,
the distribution of talk, and the significance of the
information structure. For example, among Athabaskans,
dominance is attributed to the person who speaks most and to
those who display. "Teachers" in the Athabaskan culture
then are the ones who display. However, in much of American
culture, dominance is attributed to the one who listens and
those who play the spectator role. So in American schools,
the student, rather than the teacher, displays. Such a
fundamental difference in the way power roles are related to
literacy practices is of special interest to my inquiry.
Sylvia Scribner's and Michael Cole's recent work among
the Vai people has established that the cognitive
consequences of western style schooling and the cognitive
consequences of literacy are not one and the same and that
much literacy research has measured the effects of adopting
western schooling practices rather than the effects of
adopting a script literacy.
According to Scribner and Cole, these distinctions
between literate and non-literate societies and the
cognitive strategies prevalent among them have been
mistakenly based on differences that are really social
and/or cultural. Scribner and Cole insist that literacy has
been taken to mean only reading and writing and has not
included the use of literacy or the context of literacy.
Their research among the Vai people revealed the importance
of this distinction. The Vai have three different
literacies: one based on English learned in a westernized
school setting, one based on Arabic in a religious context,
and one based on Vai language used in informal, personal
context such as family record keeping and familiar letters.
In testing the hypothesis that literate societies have
greater capacity to abstract and reason, Scribner and Cole
discovered that there was no measurable difference in
ability to reason or use logic between people literate in
Vai and those not literate in the Vai script. However, they
did find a difference in reasoning ability (or, more
precisely, ability to perform "well" on texts designed to
measure ability to draw inference) between those literate in
Vai or Arabic but not literate in English.
Scribner and Cole list among the social consequences of
literacy the following: written records provide the crucial
technology for elaboration of the arts and sciences that
characterize world history in the last 2,500 years;
invention of writing made it possible to accumulate the
knowledge of each generation as the 'working capital' for
15
the nextTT literacy is instrumental in developing
administrative and bureaucratic networks; and literacy has
propelled the growth of mass education.
Elinor Ochs’ work also challenges the notion that
context-based communication is replaced by decontextualized
communication when a person (or a society) becomes literate.
In "Planned and Unplanned Discourse" Ochs suggests a
retention model that recognizes that as an individual
becomes literate her repertoire of communicative strategies
is expanded. Ochs defines a continuum for describing
discourse that is based on features not necessarily related
to the written/spoken distinction. This is a continuum from
unplanned to planned discourse. The linguistic features of
a text--whether a spoken text or a written one--are
determined more by the degree of forethought (planning) or
spontaneity (not-planning) that has gone into the
speaker/writer’s construction of the discourse. Features
common to unplanned discourse are reliance on context for
clues to reference, clues to logical relationships, and .
relevance. Decontextualization, or reliance on text for
clues to referential meaning, logical relationships, and
relevance is common to planned discourse. Given this way of
conceptualizing or classifying difference in
contextualization, attributing it to degree of planning
rather than the ability to read and write, the description
16
"of a Literate society as one more ab le to ’ ’ "imagine,
fictionalize, hypothesize," etc. is called into question.
Deborah Tannen takes the distinction a step further in
"Oral and Literate Strategies," refining the analysis
another degree. While Ochs had compared degree of planning
that had gone into discourse, Tannen examined more of the
social dimension of the discourse, comparing uses, in formal
and informal situations. Tannen insists that context is an
important factor in determining the features of a text,
concluding that what have been considered cognitive
consequences of literacy are probably social consequences of
the contexts of literacy.
One of the striking features of most of this literacy
theory and research is the common assumption that literacy
is a means to power. Robert Patti son, in giving an
historical perspective on differences in cultux'al attitudes
toward literacy in On Literacy, has asserted that "Literacy
always has an aspect of power" (p. 61).
I do not take exception to the conclusions arrived at
or research metholologies employed by any of the researchers
reviewed here. I am, as they are, interested in
contributing to the development of a paradigm or model for
the acquisition of literacy. I want to know why two
students who have received similar instruction have
disparate literacy skills and why some students seem to be
17
motivatedTto become literate or more literate while others
seem to manifest little or no desire to take advantage of
what is offered as an opportunity for literacy education.
The kind of answers I seek for these questions will
allow the development of a more nearly complete paradigm of
the acquisition of literacy--one that includes not only the
cognitive aspects but also the soc_io-cultural dimensions of
the act of learning to read and write.
I am especially interested in seeking out those factors
which influence motivation and determine opportunities for
literacy education for different cultural populations.
While the present work will focus primarily on the culture
of freshman composition in a large, urban, private
university, I will attempt to establish a
philosophical/theoretical basis upon which, and a method
ology by which, further work on the acquisition of literacy
in other cultural populations could be pursued.
In the chapters which follow I will be examining
written autobiographical narratives of the acquisition of
literacy. These will be drawn from five selected published
autobiographies and several narratives by student writers.
Emulating Margaret Mead, I consider my freshman writing
students informants with whom I do research, rather than
subjects on whom I do experiments ("Research with Human
Beings"). I maintain that my students can, by the act of
writing an autobiographical narrative of some episode(s)
18
"from their acqulsrtion df~literacy, discover for themselves,
for me, and for other readers important socio-cultural
elements of their experience of the acquisition of literacy.
I do not assume that a single experience was the
determinant of any individual's acquisition of literacy or
that my students could identify any particular moment as the
moment of acquisition. Rather, I assume that in the process
of selecting an episode from memory and shaping it for tell
ing and retelling, these writers not only make coherent
their incoherent experience but, in doing so, also reveal
the underlying cultural values and assumptions about
education, freedom, power, and a host of other ideas which
have in part determined their experience and practice of
literacy. That is, while I concede that to some degree
one's experience is determined by socio-cultural factors and
while I wish to discover what some of these factors are, I
also believe that the act of writing a narrative and the
subsequent act of reading it (whether the reader is oneself
or another) also determines one's experience. That is,
writing is a powerful act, for by writing one constructs j
one's reality. At the same time my students examine their
pasts, they re-affirm their power to determine their
futures.
19
Chapter One Notes
JIn "The Necessity of Myth." A more nearly complete
version of the definition follows: "Myths are instruments
by which we continually struggle to make our experience
intelligible to ourselves. A myth is a large, controlling
image that gives philosophical meaning to the facts of
ordinary life; that is, which has organizing value for
experience. A mythology is a more or less articulated body
of such images, a pantheon. Without such images, experience
is chaotic, fragmentary and merely phenomenal. It is the
chaos of experience that creates them, and they are intended
to rectify it. All real convictions involve a mythology,
either in its usual, broad sense or in a private sense.
zRon Scollon and Susan Scollon have argued that western
literacy--what they characterize as "essayist literacy"--
mav not always be positively valued or have favorable
effects in non-western cultures. But they hasten to suggest
that there are many kinds of literacy which vary amongst
cultures, including a literacy specific to computer users
("]RUN TRILOGY: Can Tommy Read?"). According to the
Scollons, the literacy appropriate to a culture is always of
positive value in that culture.
20
Chapter Two: Autobiographical Narratives as Fictions
and Fictions as Truth
This chapter lays the theoretical foundation for my
examination of autobiographical narrative for insights into
the relationship between a writer's conception of herself
and her attitudes toward and practice of literacy. On
Narrative as Fiction
I begin then with a discussion of narrative, the form
into which I asked my students to shape their experiences.
Why do we tell one another narratives or stories, and how
can we understand (or believe we understand) one another’s
stories? This is what Ursula LeGuin asks in "It was a Dark
and Stormy Night": "Why are we huddling about the campfire?
Why do we tell tales, or tales about tales--why do we bear
witness, true or false? We may ask Aneirin, or Primo Levi,
we may ask Scheherazade, or Virginia Woolf. Is it because
we are so organized as to take actions that prevent our
dissolution into the surroundings?" LeGuin's answer to her
own question is that we tell stories--especially stories
about ourselves--to separate or distinguish ourselves from
what is not us; to define ourselves apart from our
surroundings; to shape our realities.
"We live in the middle, " as LeGuin says, echoing Henry
James. Choosing points for beginnings and endings for our
21
“ stories necessari”ly fa“ IsitTes them, for experience is all
middle. Making experience coherent and whole necessitates
falsifying it. Perhaps the term "falsify" is misleading
here, for it suggests that there is an objective truth which
might alternatively be represented in our stories. This
distinction between factual and fictional stories loses its
relevance if one concedes that language does not merely
represent reality but rather creates reality. This is,
essentially, Edward Sapir's view. For a time, the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis lost favor with linguists who were
seeking to identify language universals, but recently
sociolinguists have been reconsidering it. The hypothesis
is that language functions, not just as a device for
reporting experience, but also as a way of defining
experience for speakers. That is, language provides
patterns for analyzing experience--it influences and directs
perception. Language shapes thought processes. One reason
cultures differ is that the languages that create and
describe those cultures differ.
Given this, then the use of language--to speak or write
and in turn to comprehend and interpret as a hearer or
reader--gives one the power to shape her experience, for the
narrator stands outside her own experience in her attempt to
relate it. The autobiographical narratives of the
acquisition of literacy function as determiners of reality
22
~€o the vrfters. And comprehending and interpreting the
narratives in turn determines the reality of the readers.
Kenneth Pike made the following distinction between
etic and emic analysis: "Description or analyses from the
etic standpoint are 'alien,1 With criteria external to the
system. Emic' description provides an internal view with
criteria chosen from within the system. They represent to us
the, view of one familiar with this system and who knows how
to function within it himself" (cited by Turner, 145).
Victor Turner borrows Pike's distinction in order to explain
what he believes narrative does:
If . . .we regard narrative as an emic Western genre, or
a metagenre of expressive culture, it has to be seen as
one of the cultural grandchildren or greatgrandchildren of
'tribal ritual' or juridical process. But if we regard
narrative etically, as the supreme instrument for binding
the 'values' and 'goals,' in Dilthey's sense of these
terms, which motivate human conduct into situational
structures of 'meaning, ' then we must concede it to be a
universal cultural activity, embedded in the very center of
the social drama, itself another cross-cultural and
trans-temporal unit of social process (167).
We use narrative to interpret one another and interpret
ourselves to one another.
Turner places his analysis of narrative in the context J
of a discussion of the nature of a social drama. Narratives
are often highly significant elements of legal and ritual
processes in many cultures. For example, in the process of
cross-examination of witnesses, lawmen and judges construct
narratives which generate meaning, and "meaning is
apprehended by looking back over a temporal process" (157).
23
This role of narrative as meaning-maker can be extended-to
other rituals or social dramas which are motivated by a
desire for understanding and comprehension.1 (It is
appropriate, I think, to consider even a scholarly inquiry
such as this one a social drama of this kind. )
Turner further defines his concept by extending Hayden
White's concept of "story" to the social drama:
Although it might be argued that the social drama is
a story in White's sense, in that it has discernible
inaugural, transitional, and terminal motifs, that
is, a beginning, a middle, and an end, my
observations convince me that it is, indeed, a
spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of
everyone's experience in every human society. My
hypothesis, based on repeated observations of such
processual units in a range of sociocultural systems
and on my reading in ethnography and history, is that
social dramas, 'dramas of living,' as Kenneth Burke
calls them, can be aptly studied as having four
phases. These I label breach, crisis, redress, and
either reintegration or recognition of schism" (149).
The important point here is that while narrative is a part
of social drama, the social drama is itself an event which
can be narrated. Perhaps a more precise way to put this is
to say that social dramas can be the subject of a narrative.
Hayden White calls narrative a "metacode"--"a human
i
universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about
the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted" ("The
Value of Narrative," 6). White sees in narrative a solution
to the problem of translating knowing into telling.
Narrative solves "the problem of fashioning human experience
into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are
24
generally human rather than culture-specific” (5). If
narrative is such a cross-cultural code, it is an
especially appropriate form in which to elicit the
information I wish to discover. The narratives I gather
from the published autobiographies and from student writing
are less subject to the ethnocentric bias of my analysis
than "information” gathered by any other means because
these narratives are structures created by the informants
themselves, not by me. 2
White goes on to say that insofar as narrative provides
closure and plot for historical stories, reality can seem to
/
conform to the ideal. He insists that we value narrative in
representing real events because of our "desire to have real
events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and
closure of an image of life that is and can only be
imaginary. The notion that sequences of real events possess
the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary
events could only have its origins in wishes, daydreams,
reveries" (27) .
This view of narrative as a way of making coherence is
shared by Donald P. Spence, whose work, Narrative Truth and
Historical Truth, examines the role of narrative and its
interpretation in psychoanalysis. Spence discusses the
relation of psychoanalysts' interpretations and clients'
free associations, saying that interpretation requires
making coherence by making narratives. These narratives make
25
connections that are necessarily not "free" associations.
"The act of constructive listening is largely in the service
of strengthening the narrative voice of the material; we
try to give it narrative form in order to better
understand" (279). Spence cites W. H. Walsh's distinction
between plain and significant narrative ("'Plain' and
'Significant' Narrative in History" 479-84). Plain
narrative is "a description of the facts restricted to a
straightforward statement of what occurred." Significant
narrative is an account of facts "which brought out their
connections" (480). Plain narrative depends on historical
truth; significant narrative depends on narrative truth.
Those autobiographical narratives of the acquisition of
literacy which will be most useful in this research are
those that make connections and in making connections
explain the significance of the "facts" related.
Paul Ricoeur says "to tell and to follow a story is
already to reflect upon events in order to encompass them in
successive wholes" ("Narrative Theory"). He develops this
I
definition of plot: "By plot I mean the intelligible whole j
that governs a succession of events in any story. This
provisory definition immediately shows the plot's connectingj
I
function between an event or events and the story. A story
is made out of events to the extent that plot makes events
into a story" (178). (This is reminiscent of E. M. Forster's
distinction between story and plot: a story is a "narrative
26
~o£ events in their time sequence. A plot Is arso a
narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.”)
As Ricoeur points out, in the fields of historiography
and structuralist literary criticism, the narrative
component is reduced to the anecdotic surface of the story:
''Thus both the theory of history and the theory of fictional
narratives seem to take it for granted that whenever there
is time, it is always a time laid out chronologically, a
linear time, defined by a succession of instants" (171).
Fundamental to Ricoeur's definition of plot and the
definition of narrative to which it contributes is a
•recognition of the close relationship between narrativity
and temporality. He emphasizes that temporality is "that
structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity"
and narrativity is "the language structure that has
temporality as its ultimate referent" (169). Thus events,
which take place in time, that is have a temporal dimension,
must be the fundamental elements of the story. Narrative is
then "events made into a story through the plot" (178). And
every narrative has both a chronological and a
nonchronological dimension. The chronological dimension, or
the episodic dimension, characterizes the story as made up
of events. The nonchronological dimension is the
configurational dimension by which the plot makes
significant wholes of otherwise scattered events. I will
27
return to~tfTis pofnl5~i'rr_"Chapter Three's analysis of passages
from selected published autobiographies.
It is their failure to recognize this temporality of
narrative, says Ricouer, that has led historiographers to
focus on history as explanation rather than storytelling and
structuralist literary critics to emphasize the surface
grammar of literary narration rather than the dynamic
between the linear nature of events as experienced (even
when the remembered events are imagined as in a novel) and
the order of presentation or telling of events. Seeing
history or narrative as storytelling and recognizing the
dynamic between events as experienced and events as narrated
allows us to recognize, account for, and appreciate the
narrator's subjectivity rather than discredit it. It is the
very subjectiveness of the narratives of the acquisition of
literacy that makes them interesting and useful to my
purpose of discovering what personal and social-cultural
factors are perceived by the writers themselves as
determinant.
In this first section on narrative I have drawn on
theories of linguistics, anthropology, history,
psychoanalysis, and philosophy in an attempt to develop an
argument for my use of autobiographical narratives as
sources of the kind of information I seek. In the next
section I will turn to literary theory in search of a
methodology by which to analyze and interpret these.
28
narratives. ~Kt the same time, I shift f rorn viewing
narrative from the perspective of the whys and hows of
production to viewing it from the perspective of
comprehension and interpretation.
On Interpreting Narratives
The theme of narration as coherence-making is repeated
by Frank Kermode, who sees in the interpretation of
narrative a process which counters the attempt at coherence:
"we may like to think, for our purposes, of narrative as the
product of two intertwined processes, the presentation of a
fable and its progressive interpretation (which of course
alters it). The first process tends toward clarity and
propriety ('refined common sense'), the second toward
secrecy, toward distortions which cover secrets" (86) .
Kermode points out that stories, which are necessarily
interpretations of events, are in turn subject to
interpretation themselves (86), and that hearers/readers are
no more likely to agree on interpretation of stories than
different storytellers are likely to produce identical
narratives from a sequence of events.
This point is well taken,- but it doesn't support
Kermode's contention that interpretation tends toward
distortion. Interpretation is, rather, the making of a
different coherence. To suppose that the fact of different
interpretations implies "secrets" is to assume that there is
29
a single reality of-the events narrated-which is knowable
apart from any interpretation of a narration of those
events. This becomes an important point in analysis of
autobiographies which are the product of collaboration,
such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I examine in
Chapter Three. It is also relevant to a consideration of
the predominant role I have played in interpreting the
student narratives which are the subject of analysis in
Chapter Four.
Writing about the fictional narrative of the nineteenth
century novel, D. A. Miller explains that the standard
conflict between the closed form of art and the openness of
life does not especially interest him. What does interest
him is the conflict within the novel between the principle
of production which keeps the narrative going and the
working of closure to resolve meaning: "the narratable is
the very evidence of the'narrative text, while closure (as
precisely, the nonnarratable) is only the sign that this
text is over. . . . The otherness of closure suggests one of
the unwelcome implications of the narratable--that it can
never generate the terms for its own arrest" (266-7).
While Miller's discussion is concerned exclusively.with
the narrative of nineteenth century novels, his point may be
applied to the autobiographical narratives I examine in this
work. For something to be narratable, it necessarily has
elements of the unexpected, the dissonant, the nonstandard.
30
’ Yet at~the same time the narrative form worts to conform
these elements by making them coherent. Each of the writers
selects for presentation those elements from his/her
experience which seem to be most representative. Experience
which a writer perceives to be common to all is less likely
to be selected for inclusion in an autobiographical account
motivated by a desire to examine one's own unique identity.
At the same time, forming experience into a coherent account
for telling to others requires contextualizing it and
shaping it in terms understandable and comprehensible to an
audience.
Just how this audience does comprehend narrative is the
focus of work in narratology in the disciplines of cognitive
psychology and reading theory. The Work of Walter Kintsch
and Teun van Dyjk has been especially influential in this
area. In his article "On Comprehending Stories," Walter
Kintsch explains how a reader, like the writer, goes through
a meaning making/coherence-making process. For the reader,
the goal of this process is to comprehend and interpret the
narrative. Kintsch assumes that meaning is represented as a
hierarchically ordered list of propositions, a propositional
microstructure. The propositional macrostructure is
obtained by further analysis of the propositions that
constitute the microstructure. We must assume then a
processing stage for comprehension so we can abstract and
summarize a text.
31
Organizing a story into Tts categorica1 units, KintsciT
says, is a strategy, not a rule based procedure. One thing
that helps is graphic clues--paragraphing, macroconnectors
("but," "however," "so"), and discontinuities in time,
location, actors, story content. The central event in a
story--the complication--is signalled by a frame change
which makes original exposition no longer relevant and so a
new frame takes over. Kintsch posits Norman and Bobrow's
principle of continuously available output: we must view the
visual feature analysis as an ongoing process, the output of
which is continuously monitored at the next higher level.
Top-down processes interact with bottom-up analyses in a
complex manner depending on the perceptual situation, the
nature of the text, and the reader's goal ("Principles of
Memory Schemata").
Other researchers, influenced by Noam Chomsky1s Aspects
model of generative transformational grammar, have attempted
to write a "story grammar" in order to describe the
essential elements of narrative and explain the process of
comprehension of stories. Among these are David Rummelhart
and Bonnie J. F. Meyer.3
The findings of these researchers regarding what .
skilled readers do in order to understand a story is helpful
in developing a comprehensive paradigm for how narrative
works. Such a model will aid in both justifying and
characterizing my use of the narratives of the acquisition
32
~of~Ti~teracy as sources of-the information I am seeding, as
it can explain the processes I use myself as I analyze both
published narratives and student narratives. This
self-reflexive quality of my inquiry is inescapable--a
point to which I return -repeatedly because it is central to
my argument for the validity of both the data and the
interpretation of the data offered in these narratives.
Sociolinguist William Labov examined oral versions of
personal experience in order to develop an analytic
framework by which complex narratives might be examined.
His work was based on over five hundred interviews in which
he studied the development of narrative technique in groups
ranging from children to adults and from lower class to
middle class. Labov was especially interested in discovering
the relationship between the sequence of narrative elements
and the inferred sequence of events. He identified as
narrative units the restricted clause, the free clause, and
the narrative clause. From this he developed a definition
of narrative as any sequence of clauses which contains at
least one temporal juncture (the condition under which any
two clauses are ordered with respect to each other and
cannot be interchanged without change in the temporal
sequence of the original semantic interpretation.)
While the structures identified by Meyer and her
colleagues are more global, describing functional relations
that transcend modes, the structure identified by Labov is
33
peculiar to narrative. According to Labov, narrative
structure is made up of the following elements: 1)
orientation--a group of free clauses which serve to orient
the listener to person, place, time, and behavioral
situation; 2) complication--the main body of narrative
clauses usually comprising a series of events; 3)
evaluation--wherein the narrator must delineate the
structure of the narrative by emphasizing the point where
the complication has reached a maximum--between complication
and result (this element reveals the attitude of the
narrator towards the narrative); 4) resolution--which
follows evaluation; and 5) coda--a functional device for
returning the verbal perspective to the present moment.
It is this work of Labov*s that in part prompted Mary
Louise Pratt's extended discussion of the need for a
language theory inclusive enough to account not only for the
differences between the speech situations of literary and
nonliterary discourse but also for the structural
similarities between literature and ordinary language. In
Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Pratt
points out that Labov found in natural narratives the same
structural features Russian formalists such as Sklovskij
described as elements of literary narrative. In "Art as .
Technique," Sklovskij identified devices such as "ordinary
or negative parallelism, comparison, repetition, balanced
structure, hyperbole, the commonly accepted rhetorical
34
figures, aricFaTl-'fhose methods which emphasize the emotional
effect of an expression." Labov's catalogue of evaluation
devices also includes ordinary and negative parallelism,
comparison, and repetition (68).
Among the common features identified by both Labov and
Russian formalists are the possibility of distinguishing
between the sequence of events referred to by the narrative
and the order of the clauses which refer to those events.
As Pratt notes, Labov's subdivision of the narrative into
six main components resembles the traditional organization
we see in narrative literature:
"All the problems of coherence, chronology,
causality, foregrounding, plausibility, selection of
detail, tense, point of view, and emotional intensity
exist for the natural narrator just as they do for
the novelist, and they are confronted and solved
(with greater or lesser success) by speakers of the
language every day. These are not rhetorical
problems that literary narrators have had to solve by
inventing a poetic language; they are problems whose
solutions can readily be adapted from spoken to
written discourse'' (66-67).
35
’ “Pratt notes further that theimportant difference between
Labov's analysis and that of the formalists examining
narrative is that Labov's analysis is presented in terms of
devices speakers use to produce effects in hearers, rather
than in terms of characteristics utterances manifest (72).
That is, "Labov in effect translates the rather opaque
question 'Has the poetic function dominated the verbal
organization of this message?’ into the broader and more
meaningful questions ’What is the speaker trying to do in
forming this discourse?’ and ’What does the hearer do when
*»
he receives it?’ It is the answers to these questions which
motivate Labov’s statements about the formal properties of
his data. His analysis, in other words, is
context-dependent, anchored in the circumstances surrounding
the utterance" (73).
The Critical Inquiry issue, "Narrative Theory” (Autumn
1980) which contained many of the articles to which I have
referred here also included a response section
("Afterthoughts on Narrative") in which Robert Scholes and
Barbara Herrnstein Smith expressed their opinions.
Regarding the theory of language implied by a particular
model of narrative, Scholes asks these questions:
Do we, by our processes of signification, give a
spurious order to chaos, creating selves and worlds
both bounded by language? Or is there an order always
already in place before we seek to shape it? Does the
differentiating process meet no resistance in the
36
phenomena ft orders? Or is the play of dTf ference
itself shaped and systematized by a necessity outside
itself we call 'the world'? (206).
In developing his own answer to these questions,
Scholes goes on to define a "real" event as "something that
happens: a happening, an occurrence, an event" and a
"narrated" event as "the symbolization of a real event: a
temporal icon." Based on this, Scholes defines narration as
"the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events connected
by subject matter and related by time" (209). He further
elaborates: "A narration, then, is a text which refers, or
seems to refer, to some set of events outside of itself"
(209).
Scholes is attempting to define the nature of a story
by drawing on Pierce's semiotic triad of sign, object, and
interpretant. Scholes identifies the object of the story as
"the sequence of events to which it refers"; the sign as the
text in which the story is told (or the medium--print, film,
etc.); the interpretant as the "constructed sequence of
events" generated by the reading of this text.
All three of these aspects of a story (events, text,
and interpretation) have a temporal structure or implied
temporal structure. Events happen in the flow of time; the
signs which make up the text have an order which is
perceived in time; and an interpretation of a story, says
Scholes, always includes "an attempt to recapitulate the
natural order and duration of events." There is a necessary
37
sequence 'to the three aspects of a story: narrative Ts
always presented as if the events came first, the text came
second, and the interpretation came third. Scholes calls
this sequence a process by which "events themselves have
become humanized--saturated with meaning and value--at the
stage of entextualization and again at the stage of
interpretation" (211).
Scholes sees in this structure a means for explaining
the common differentiation between historical (or factual)
narrative and fictional narrative:
The producer of a historical text affirms that the
events entextualized did indeed occur prior to the
entextualization. Thus it is quite proper to bring
extratextual information to bear on those events when
interpreting and evaluating a historical narrative.
Any important event which is ignored or slighted by a
historical narrative may properly be offered as a
weakness in that narrative. It is certainly otherwise
with fiction, for in fiction the events may be said to
be created by and with the text. They have no prior
temporal existence, even though they are presented as
if they did. . . . Both history and fiction assume the
normal flow of events, and the interpretation of both
kinds of texts involves the construction of a diegesis
in which this flow is re-created by the interpreter
with every event in order and all relationships as
clear as possible" (211) .
Though Scholes' distinction seems to be based on the kind of
narrative, that is, on distinctive characteristics of
narrative texts, a closer reading of the paragraph quoted
above reveals a distinction based on the interpretive
approach. On the one hand, one can read a "fictional"
narrative and evaluate it against one's own perception of
reality (or "extratextual information"). On a literal
38
"level, such a reading bears the fruit of frustration and
confusion. On a deeper level/ such a reading constitutes
pragmatic literary criticism.
On the other hand, one can read "historical" narrative
without reference to one's own perception of reality,
evaluating it not in terms of its conformity to perceived
reality but in terms of the felicity and appeal of its
construction or creation of a reality. This is how I will
be reading autobiographical narratives of the acquisition of
literacy. While these narratives present themselves as
historical, interpreting them as fiction or linguistic
artifice will allow me to get at the cultural and personal
values and assumptions which motivate and determine the
shape the stories take.
In consideration of some of these same questions which
Scholes articulated, Barbara Herrnstein Smith contends that
what researchers on narrative have called basic stories or
deep-plot structures in narratives are not abstractions from
actual narratives parallelling on a higher discourse level
the distinctions of generative transformational grammar.
Rather they are themselves retellings of the stories and
thus are alternate versions of those narratives. Further,
these so-called deep plots are "constructed, as all versions
are, by someone in particular, on some occasion, for some
purpose, and in accord with some relevant set of principles"
(219).
39
TE1 s ”"two-level modeTT" says SnTitH^ is what gives rise
to the inordinate amount of attention narratologists give to
the idea that there appear to be temporal disparities and
anachronies between an "actual" sequence of events and the
sequence of presentation in the narrative. The notion that
a conformity between these is possible, Smith points out, is
based on a conception of discourse as consisting of "sets of
discrete signs which, in some way correspond, to (depict,
encode, denote, refer to, and so forth) sets of discrete and
specific ideas, objects, or events" (225).
What is of interest in a narrative is not only the
story, but also the telling of the story--which includes all
the contextual elements of the social transaction or the
rhetorical situation. Smith's purpose in pointing this out
is to show that the two-level model of narrative structure
implies an absence of "human purposes, perceptions, actions,
or interactions" (220).
Smith proposes an alternative model of language which
views utterances not as signifiers of discrete signifieds,
but as verbal responses. These verbal responses are "acts
which, like any acts, are performed in response to various
sets of conditions" (225) . Given this model of language,
narratives would not be seen as surface-discourse-
signifiers of underlying-story-signifieds but as
the verbal acts of particular narrators performed in
response to--and thus shaped and constrained by--sets
of multiple interacting conditions. For any narrative
40
these condTtions would consist: ol ( ’ 1 " ) such
circumstantial variables as the particular context
and material setting (cultural and social, as well as
strictly 'physical') in which the tale is told, the
particular listeners or readers addressed, and the
nature of the narrator's relationship to them, and
(2) such psychological variables as the narrator's
motives for telling the tale and all the particular
interests, desires, expectations, memories,
knowledge, and prior experiences (including his
knowledge of various events, of course, but also of
other narratives and of various conventions and
traditions of storytelling) that shaped the
particular way he told it (226) .
These conditions which Smith has specified correspond
closely to what Lloyd Bitzer has identified as the elements
of the rhetorical situation ("The Rhetorical Situation").
A second implication of the two-level model of
narrative is that prior to and independent of the narrative
there actually existed some determinate set of events which
took place in some determinate order or sequence. Smith
notes that the same capacity which enables us to imagine
events which never occur also enables us to make narrative
sense or structure of general, vague, and perhaps imprecise
memories, diffuse and possibly contradictory bits of
information, and diverse visual, auditory, and kinesthetic
images which can be organized, interpreted, and understood
as a particular sequence of events only in and through the
very act of presenting them as such in a narrative (229) .
When we view narrative as not just an account of an
event but as itself a part of the social transaction, which
includes not only the speaker/writer and the audience, but
41
ITIso their motivations, we can better understand-how both-"
natural and literary narratives function.
If, as Smith says, the features of individual
narratives are functions of variables that control all
narratives, and similarities and differences among sets of
narratives can be explained on the basis of the conditions
that elicited them, then my comparison and analysis of
autobiographical narratives of the acquisition of literacy
by published authors and student writers must examine not
only the structural similarities and differences between the
narrative texts, but also the rhetorical situations from
which they arose.
While I agree with Smith that examining the differences
between the structures of texts and the structures of events
implied by them is of questionable value by itself alone,
the fact remains that the act of narrating is a
constructive one, which implies that a structure, the
structure narrated by the author, does exist and is
available for examination and analysis. Smith's
attribution of the two-level model of storytelling to
Piercian semiotics is misguided. The linguists'
distinction between an abstract underlying structure and
structure realized in a surface representation upon which
the story grammar model is based should not be confused
with the distinction made by Scholes and others between a
set of events experienced extratextually and the
42
representation ofThose events in a textT Both of~Chese
distinctions are made in an attempt to account for
differences in narrations of a single set of events, but
they distinguish different things. The linguists
distinguish one telling from other tellings. Scholes
distinguishes the language used from the propositional
content, or the telling from what is told.
We need not assume that a narrative text reflects or
refers to or represents a reality other than itself in order
to have an object for structural analysis. That is, it is
possible to view all narratives as fictional narratives and
completely disregard or make irrelevant the question of
'truth value.” This is the viewpoint I will assume toward
the autobiographical narratives I examine. I am interested
not in whether and how they reflect an objective reality,
but in how they create a reality which can be examined. I
assume that the narratives do not represent a series of
events but rather reveal a set of attitudes, values, and
assumptions which make up a psychological reality. I am
interested not in what events happened in these individuals'
acquisition of literacy, but rather in what events these
individuals will relate.
In the section which follows, I will develop the
argument that autobiographical narrative, like other
narrative, is a fiction in that it is a linguistic artifice
by which we make sense of our experience.
43
Autobiography and Human Understanding
The thesis of the first half of this chapter was that
narrative is a linguistic artifice which creates meaning
through "fictional" or fashioned constructs. The thesis of
this second half complements this. I will be developing the
position that autobiography can serve as a method for
achieving human understanding. As with the preceding
section, I develop this point in order to lay the foundation
and articulate an apology for my examination of several
published autobiographies and student narratives for
insights into socio-cultural factors in the context of
literacy acquisition.
Autobiography is a way of discoursing. As such it is
symbolic action. Kenneth Burke identifies
self-portraiture, his term for autobiography, as one
terministic screen for analysis of all symbolic action:
I'd say that any piece of symbolic action, finished
on the page, can be analyzed as a poem, as rhetoric,
as science, as self-portraiture (including the kinds
of self-portraiture we encounter in the analysis of a
work as representing a given historic era, or a .given
social class, or a psychological type). But some
things lend themselves more profitably to one such
'terministic screen' than to others ("Reply" 132).
Though many autobiography theorists would concur with
Burke in viewing all writing as autobiographical, and though
44
T7~too, see the pEITLosopHTcaTl and-theoretical advantages irT
such a perspective, the autobiographical narratives examined
in this study conform to a narrower, more specific set of
criteria:, all are fist person accounts of sequences of
events in the experience of a writer which that writer has
put into a meaningful construct. Though the methodology I
propose and apply later in this work will be, theoretically,
applicable to a number of different questions and directions
of inquiry, in this study its application is limited to
autobiographical narratives of the acquisition of literacy.
Before proposing that methodology, I will quite briefly
discuss some of the theoretical and philosophical
assumptions which underlie use and criticism of
autobiography in the disciplines of literary studies,
anthropology, and historiography. These three are among the
areas of study upon which the field of literacy studies
draws and which it reciprocally informs. This discussion
will introduce my own use of autobiography in literacy
v
studies.
In Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience
(1982), Janet Varner Gunn gives a brief explanation of what
she considers the guiding philosophical assumptions which
have influenced the development of autobiographical.theory.
She attributes to Descartes' influence the tradition in
theory of equating the autobiographical act of "unsituating
the self from the world" to a "condition of the self's
45
authentic nature. " That view o~f autobi ography as most
essentially self-expressive has dominated much autobiography
theory and criticism.
Gunn's alternative is to see autobiography as not only
the private act of self writing, but also the "cultural act
of a self-reading" (8).
Reading takes place at two moments of what I will be
defining as the autobiographical situation: by the
autobiographer who, in effect, is 'reading' his or her
life; and by the reader of the autobiographical text.
This reading (or interpretive activity) takes place,
moreover, by selves who inhabit worlds, not by a
subject who has had to pay the price of
world-habitation for access to itself (9).
Autobiography is therefore not simply an expression of self,
it is also creation and interpretation of self.
It is within the context of narrative theory,
hermeneutics, and the issue of the determinate meaning of
texts that Gunn's philosophical and theoretical discussion
places the questions of generic characteristics and
definitions which have dominated autobiography criticism
and theory. Though these are not, Gunn emphasizes,
irrelevant or uninteresting questions, they must be
situated in the readers' world of "contingent historical
experience" (12).
In developing her argument for this contextualization
of autobiography studies, Gunn suggests that the
"autobiographical situation" be seen as a composite of three
"moments": the autobiographical impulse, which arises out of
46
an attempt~to make sense of experience; the autobiographical”
perspective, which shapes this autobiographical impulse by
shaping it into a narrative; and the autobiographical
response, which defines the reader's relation to the
autobiographical text. Identifying these as moments allows
Gunn to focus on the the finitude and historicity of the
experiences of writing and reading autobiography. Like
Kenneth Burke, Gunn views discourse as an event rather than
an object. The discourse event of autobiography can then be
analyzed and interpreted in a cultural and historical
context.
The autobiographical response which Gunn identifies
belongs to the context of the culture as a whole--where the
act of reading is not a professional specialization but a
part of being human. "In modern western culture (the
culture out of which autobiography emerged), literacy is
indispensable to fully human survival" (19). Though Gunn's
statement that the genre emerged out of western culture is
perhaps indefensible, most autobiography scholars would
agree that autobiographical discourse is an outgrowth of
the introduction of literacy to a culture. I will explore
this relation between autobiographical discourse and the
development of literacy in my analysis of published
autobiographies.
The response, or the reading which is interpretation,
on the part of the reader of the autobiographical text is
47
"siTnflar to the interpretive act By the writer of the
autobiographical text. Just as the writer has "read" or
interpreted experience by making meaning through
constructing a text, the reader of that text interprets in
the constructive act of reading and in turn better
understands himself through the act of interpretation. The
writer "reads" himself in the act of writing the
autobiographical text. The reader "writes" himself in the
act of reading the autobiographical text.
This perspective also allows us to view autobiography
as not only an event to be understood in the context of its
time, but also as both one of the determiners of subsequent
events and a source of understanding of events.
As the reader of his or her life, the autobiographer
inhabits the hermeneutic universe where all
understanding takes place. The autobiographer serves,
by this habitation, as the paradigmatic reader; and
the autobiographical text, embodying this reading,
becomes, in turn, a model of the possibilities and
problems of all interpretive activity (22).
(A model of self-interpretive activity, the autobiog
raphical text also models the practice of literacy--a point
I develop at the end of this chapter.) Autobiography
interprets the self by reading the self and by writing the
self.
The autobiographer reads and writes in order to create
a context for the self. Autobiography can create a context
for the self because storytelling is a cultural occasion, a
uniquely human act. Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff has
48
proposed renaming the species "'homo narrans” (TatoryteTler)~~
because by describing lives in their plainness and depth,
routineness and moments of exaltation, we recreate the human
experience that has permitted our species to survive (272).
In reading of another's life, one becomes more aware of what
it is to be human. Together, the writer and reader achieve
understanding by shaping past social experience and giving
it meaning through the autobiographical text. Albert Stone
explains it thusly:
Like other historians seeking adductively to
formulate plausible explanations and descriptions of
past events, an autobiographer offers an inter
pretation of the surviving records of his or her own
past. Even when these records are simply private
memories they become in a true sense public property.
The process of reinventing a plausible and satisfying
history is therefore very much a collective
enterprise (4).
In a chapter analyzing life histories, both biographies
and autobiographies, in Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a
Hopi Indian, Leo W. Simmons suggests that individuals be
considered as created, creator, carrier, and manipulator of
the mores of their group and that some theory of adjustment
and/or adaptation is also required for a systematic
assessment of the individual's life in relation to the
group. Life histories provide a unique type of data in that
they establish a "level of continuity in behavior that is
more fundamental than either biological, environmental,
societal, or cultural determinants, being in fact a
synthesis of all four" (346).
49
As Stephen Spender points out Th "Confessions and
Autobiography, " the autobiographer1 * considering the material
of his own past experience is confronted by two selves--the
social or historic personality which is the self as others
see him, and the self which is seen from inside his own
existence. In the act. of writing an account of his
experience, the autobiographer objectifies what was
subjective experience. This is, Spender says, the essence
of art: "The self-revelation of the experience of the self
is a measuring of the human instrument by itself. The
observer is self-observed" (67).
Albert Stone unravels the apparent contradiction in the
characterization of autobiography as both subjective and
objective by reminding us, and in this he follows nineteenth
century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, that all information
about social processes and human institutions is necessarily
ultimately subjective; for it "comes to us . . .in the
shape of interpreted personal experience; it is never raw
data. The past is re-presented by a reminiscing writer who
tries to show how certain events, relationships, ideas, and
institutions have become functionally and imaginatively
interrelated in his or her own life" (6) .
Once we concede that a single telling of a life is a
wholly subjective construct of reality, we must concede that
any and all tellings of lives are subjective constructs of
individual realities. Agreeing to that, we must agree that
50
aXr“EnowIeage we gain about ourselves and one another from
ourselves and one another is subjective.
Autobiography is, as Stone says, a participant-observer
science (7), and as such involves a human gathering
information from a human. In this way, autobiography is
like anthropology or psychoanalysis, except that the
autobiographer is his own subject.
In his extensive and detailed study of the historical
development of autobiography, The History of Autobiography
in Antiquity, Georg Misch bases his analyses of
autobiographical works on a view of autobiography as a
subjective construct of reality. The genre flowered, he
says, with Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries
because "now it was aware of its true nature and emerged as
an independent type of literature with its specific subject,
the self-experienced reality of a human life" (539).
Misch’s work in autobiography was based on the
conception of the genre suggested in the work of Wilhelm
Dilthey. Dilthey's central project was an investigation of
the ways man knows man through everyday contact and through
human studies. Man must be studied, Dilthey maintained,
differently from the way the rest of nature is studied,
because human beings can report or comment to other human
beings upon their thoughts and feelings. In his
introduction to Dilthey's work, Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of
51
Human Studies, H. P. Rickham describes Dilthey's position
in this way:
His solution, characteristic of his whole approach,
was that human beings, by their plans and purposes,
give what meaning there is to history. To search for
meaning in history was, for him, a question of
discovering and studying the ideas which prompted
human actions (11).
Some of this historical knowledge was, he thought,
discoverable in archives, letters, and autobiographies. And
his definition of autobiography extended to most literature,
because he did not define the genre by its forms, but by the
perspectives or uses of the reader.
Neither did Dilthey distinguish between autobiography
as an historical document and autobiography as literature.
As Rudolph Mukkreel points out in his study, PiIthey:
Philosopher of Human Studies, for Dilthey, the poem was both
an expression of the private experience of the poet and a
socio-cultural product (81). And autobiography, like poetry,
is a creation of the mind and a product of human activity.
Here are some excerpts from Dilthey's works which deal
specifically with autobiography (as translated by H. P.
Rickham):
Autobiography is the highest and most instructive
form in which the understanding of life confronts us.
. . The man who understands it is the same as the one
who created it. A particular intimacy of under
standing results from this. . . .He has, in his
memory, singled out and accentuated the moments which
he experienced as significant; others he has allowed
to sink into forgetfulness. The future has corrected
his illusions about the significance of certain
moments. Thus, the first problem of grasping and
52
presenting historical connections is already half
solved by life.
Here we approach the root of all historical
comprehension. Autobiography is merely the literary
expression of a man's reflection on the course of his
life. . .The power and breadth of -our own lives and
the energy with which we reflect on them are the
foundation of historical vision (86-87).
The task of all history is to grasp the systems of
interactions. The historiographer penetrates more
deeply into the structure of the historical world by
sorting out and studying individual contexts.
Understanding presupposes experience and experience
only becomes insight into life if understanding leads
us from the narrowness and subjectivity of experience
to the whole and the general. ' Moreover, the
understanding of an individual personality to be
complete demands systematic knowledge, while
systematic knowledge is equally dependent on the
vivid grasping of the individual. Knowledge of
inorganic nature proceeds through a hierarchy of
sciences in which the lower stratum is always
independent of the one for which it lays the
foundations; in the human studies everything from
the process of understanding onwards is determined by
the relationship of mutual dependence (94) .
These passages from Dilthey make the transition from
the preceding discussion of autobiography as a verbal act
which makes meaning to a discussion of the autobiographical
text as a verbal artifact which represents meaning and mades
ideology manifest through myth and metaphor. Autobiography
is both an act of understanding by humans and a source of
understanding of humans. These complementary discussions
lay the theoretical foundation and articulate an apology for
the research and analysis methodology I employ in my
examination of published and student autobiographical
narratives of the acquisition of literacy.
53
AlTtobi o g r aphi c aI discourse is one way a literate
culture constructs a collective reality. Many autobiography
theorists have concentrated on the relationship between
autobiography and the concept of individuality. Georg Misch
has argued that autobiography is a product of the forces
which operate in the development of the concept of
individuality in a culture. His study of autobiographical
writings in various European languages viewed the texts as
revelatory of the development of the individual's sense of
personality in the Western world.
Others such as Karl Weintraub have identified
autobiography itself as one of these forces because it
offers the opportunity for the expression of one's thoughts
and recording of one's inner experience. While both of
these perspectives offer insights, a third perspective must
be tried in considering the role of autobiographical
discourse in a culture.
Autobiography is a linguistic construct of reality
originating from a single member of a culture. At the same
time, it comes into its full being only when it is read, as
it was meant to be, by other members of the culture.
Through discourse, author and audience collectively
construct a collective reality.
The autobiographer's discourse re-creates the patterns
and plots which his socio-cultural experience has taught
him. His discourse thus reflects and reinforces, by
54
retel“ring KTs Nurture' s myths and. re-using his cuTture '~s
metaphors, that culture's collective created version of
reality. A contributor to this collective reality,
autobiography is a cultural document. As such it is a
source of information for anyone desiring a better
understanding of the myths and ideology of the culture in
which and from which it arises.
Avrom Fleishman devotes his attention to the
representation of personal myth through the metaphors of
individual autobiography (Figures of Autobiography).
Drawing from and improving upon James Olney's discussion of
autobiography as metaphor in Metaphors of Self: The Meaning
of Autobiography, Fleishman suggests that the student of
autobiography look to the "drama of the metaphors
themselves--that is the mythos of autobiography, for the way
in which metaphors dynamically become myths is the general
model for the way in which autobiographical narrative
generates a self or personal myth" (26). Fleishman
distinguishes three senses of myth in his discussion: the
traditional body of tales which is often the source of
metaphor, the narrative the autobiographer constructs from
a sequence of metaphors, and the "created identity" he
forms in the process of writing (27). These three senses
of myth come together in the creative activity of
autobiography.
55
~~ The metaphors which iTi3iVidua'1 auto biographers se lect
in order to present their personal myths can be seen in the
context of the myths shared collectively by the culture.
Albert Stone makes this claim in Autobiographical Occasions
and Original Acts:
the cultural critic's task is to identify and connect
the mythic and ideological components of an
individual’s story, noting the distinctive ways each
author manipulates ideas to make bridges between
public life and private experience, past and present,
.and between writer and reader (16) .
It is in this sense that autobiography is a cultural
document. And it- is in this way that I approach the
published and student autobiographical narratives of the
acquisition of literacy in order to learn from them the
cultural myths and ideologies by which their authors have
lived in and defined their experience of learning to read
and write, or, more broadly, of becoming literate.
Viewing autobiography as a cultural document dissolves,
for the purposes of this inquiry, several of the critical
problems which have occupied autobiography theorists. The
question of the truth/fiction status of autobiography is j
i
replaced by the question of what intention the reader
attributes to the author. Placing the autobiography in the
historical context of its reading puts the focus on the
reader's perception of the truth value of the autobiography
rather than on any feature of the text which can be thought
to indicate the factual or fictional nature of the text.
56
THls Is not to say that the verffTaBTe 31 screpancies
between the autobiographer's account of his experience and
reports of that experience from other sources are of no
interest. Rather it is to say that the author's version and
even the discrepancies themselves are of as much interest as
the "verifiable truth." Roy Pascal's work, Design and
Truth in Autobiography, makes this same point. As John
Pilling observes,
Pascal was the first to see what followed from
opposing notions of 'truth' to notions of 'design,'
without being tempted to drive a wedge between them;
rather he was intent on asserting that truth might
partake of design and that design might embody truth
(2).
It is in the author's version of his life that we see
reflected his vision of reality.
A second dichotomy created by autobiography theorists
which is erased by viewing autobiography as a cultural
document is the art/science dichotomy. This second
dichotomy is very like the first in that it aligns fiction
with art and history with science, including history among
the sciences. As William R. Siebenschuh has noted in
Fictional Techniques in Factual Works, it can be argued that
histories (and autobiographies as personal histories) are
"much closer to being products of the fictive imagination
than they are to being in any sense scientific." And
Claude Levi-Strauss (The Savage Mind) has suggested that
all historical writing be seen as interpretation encoded
57
“into discourse that~Is more poetic than scientific (25Y)~.
More recently, Hayden White has argued that elements
and poetic structures traditionally identified with poetry
are always also part of even the most objective histories
(Tropics of Discourse). White breaks historical discourse
down into two levels of meaning. On the manifested or
literal surface of the discourse are the facts and their
formal explanation, while the figurative language used in
setting forth these facts is indicative of the deep
structural meaning (106).
White uses the term emplotment to characterize the
narrative strategies historians use to organize events into
a meaningful and coherent order. Creating a plot structure,
a comprehensible process of development resembling the
articulation of a drama or a novel, is one way an historian
works out an interpretation of the past.
To return to the quotation from Kenneth Burke with
which I began this section, "any piece of symbolic action .
. .can be analyzed as a poem, as rhetoric, as science, as
self-portraiture." A text's status as art (literary
discourse) or as history (scientific discourse) is not
determined by features of the text but by the reader's
perspective and purpose.
Autobiography as a Model of Literate Culture
An underlying assumption of this discussion has been
that all discourse is interpretive. Autobiography is a
58
selT-ref I ex i ve mode of wriften discourse. In Forms of
Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre
William Spengemann characterizes it as "a work about itself.
.Autobiographies do not refer to someone who exists
prior to them. . . .Autobiography thus becomes synonymous
with symbolic action in any form and the word ceases to
designate a particular kind of writing (168).
Michael Sprinker has expressed it in this way:
"Autobiography, the inquiry of the self into its own origin
and history, is always circumscribed by the limiting
conditions of writing, of the production of a text (342) .
As a self-creating, self-interpreting, self-expressive
mode of discourse, autobiography provides a model of
literate culture. Albert Stone has called autobiography a
"more or less trustworthy linguistic bridge between one self
or soul and others" which recreates "a model of literate
culture itself and the social circumstances in which
individual personality is discovered, asserted, and
confirmed (or denied) and community potentiality
established" (5).
In this chapter I have set forth, in abstract and
theoretical terms the thesis that autobiographical
narratives are a source of human understanding. In the
chapter which follows I consider five autobiographies which
argue many of the same points in a much more concrete and
imaginative way.
59
Chapter Two Notes
1h similar point is made in Julian Jaynes' discussion
of "narratization" and by W. Ross Winterowd in "Dramatism
in Themes and Poems." See also my use of Kenneth Burke's
notion of "representative anecdote" in Chapter Four.
2This point is similar to one Walter R. Fisher has made
in "Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm," where he
proposes a theory of human communication based on a
conception of persons as homo narrans. Fisher's proposed
narrative paradigm synthesizes what he identifies as two
main strands in rhetorical theory. The argumentative,
persuasive theme and the literacy/aesthetic theme.
3 In "Understanding and Summarizing Brief Stories" (In
Cognitive Processes in Comprehension. Ed. Marcel Adam Just
and Patricia Carpenter. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
265-301.), David Rymmelhart presents a general model of
comprehension consistent with evidence and theoretical
accounts, developing a special case model as an example.
From this evolves a model of gist which Rummelhart relates
to the recall of stories. According to Rummelhart, the
process of comprehension is the process of selecting and
verifying conceptual schemata to account for the situation
(or text) to be understood.
Two of the schemata he identifies are the episode and
the try. The episode relates an initiating event, a goal,
and an attempt to accomplish the goal. The try specifies
the internal structure of the attempt. The four major
variables and subordinate variables of these schemata can
be represented in trees as are phrase structure rules for
which the top nodes are the most inclusive or general. One
can summarize on different levels depending on the amount
of detail one wants to include.
Bonnie J. F. Meyer, concentrating her research in
narrative on the question of how and what readers remember,
has developed a prose analysis technique which produces a
"content structure" which hierarchically organizes ideas
into a tree structure where lines along nodes indicate
organization of content. Meyer, with Marilyn Horing, David
Brandt, and Carol Walker, examines the relationship between
text structure and what people remember from their reading.
These authors view the structure of a text as ideas which
can be arranged into high, middle, and lower levels, and
ideas are shown to be either subordinate, coordinate, or
superordinate. A passage can be viewed as a complex
proposition which can be decomposed into sub-propositions
bearing certain relations to one another. Complex
propositions have a predicate and arguments. The predicate
is either lexical, with inter-sentence relations
60
"(microlevel or local) or rhetorical, with intersentence and
interparagraph relations (macrolevel or global).
This group of researchers has identified four types of
structures in stories and expository texts: 1) response,
which relates a problem (or question) to a solution; 2)
adversative, which relates what did happen to what did not
(favored view to an opposing view); 3) covariance, which
relates an antecedent to its consequent (or causal
relations); and 4) attribution, which relates a collection
of attributes to an event or idea.
‘ ‘Spender focusses his interest in autobiography as it
contributes to the development of a writer as writer or
artist, as do many of the autobiography theorists from the
field of literacy criticism and theory. Typical of these
is Donald Pizer, who explicitly states that his purpose in
examining Hamland Garland's autobiography is to "indicate
the ways in which Garland profited from his thirty-year
career as a professional writer of fiction to select,
arrange, and emphasize the details of his life in order to
impose design and meaning on his experiences and so
transform personal history into art" ("Hamlin Garland's A
Son of the Middle Border, " 77). Though my purposes for
examining the autobiographies of published writers and
student writers are not the same as those represented by
Spender and Pizer, I share their interest in the
self-reflexive nature of autobiography, an aspect of the
subject I discuss later in this chapter.
61
Chapter Three: The Myth of Literacy for Autonomy
in Five Published Autobiographies
A pervasive myth of literacy as a path to autonomy
motivates, supplies structure for, and is realized in
autobiographical accounts of the acquisition of literacy.
This is the theme I will develop in this chapter, tracing
the representation of this myth in five published
autobiographies, specifically those by John Stuart Mill,
Henry Adams, Richard Rodriguez, Maxine Hong Kingston, and
Malcolm X. Every one of these texts is a rich literary
work, but I will be limiting my analysis to the themes of
power and autonomy represented in their narratives of how
they became literate.
These texts present the myth self-reflexively. At the
same time the authors represent the theme that learning to
read and write led to their eventual autonomy, they create
and assert that autonomy. For telling one's life story or a
portion thereof is a way to gain control of that life by
interpreting it and shaping it into a structure of meaning.
In each of the texts analyzed, this myth of literacy as
a path to autonomy is represented as a narrative of
experiences which reflect the acquisition of increasing
literacy skills, increasing ability to use those skills for
62
a purpose, and increasing confidence in the author's own
purposes. The experiences narrated are those in which these
increases either were effected or in which the increases and
their significance came to the author's awareness.
The structure of these narratives can be simplified or
abstracted into a macrotext having this macroplot: Once I
became literate, I used my literacy to gain autonomy. The
cause-effect relationship this implies dictates to some
extent the structure of the narrative (or its
macrostructure). The content of the narratives can be
simplified to this macrotheme: Literacy is the path to
autonomy. I am calling this the myth of "literacy for
autonomy." It is the macro-proposition common to all the
narratives which constitute this genre. Throughout my
analysis, I will use the terms macroplot and macrotheme
because they are more suited to my approach to the
autobiographical narratives as fiction than the more
standard terms macrostructure and macro-proposition.
Together the macroplot and macrotheme constitute the
macrotext.
An abstraction of the macrotext is suggested by the
following diagram:
acquisition of literacy+ - awareness of utility of literacy-
* t
practice of literacy - * ■ awareness of own literacy
63
This process is a recursive one. The awareness of the
utility of literacy--that literacy can be used to accomplish
one's own purposes--leads to or motivates the furtherance of
literacy skills, which in turn leads to an expanded practice
of literacy, leading to increasing awareness of oneself as a
literate person . . . and so on, perhaps, indefinitely.
This diagram can to some degree capture the recursive nature
of this process of becoming literate.
But, because narrative is linear, the narratives which
delineate this macrotext must represent this recursive
process as a linear one. This suggests modifying the
abstraction of the macrotext into this narrative version:
I acquired literacy skills. Then I was able to use
these skills. As I used the skills I became aware that
I possessed them. This awareness led me to an
awareness that I could use my literacy to achieve my
own purposes. Realizing literacy was of use, I
furthered my skills. Once I increased my skills, I
became more confident of them. With increasing
confidence, I used literacy to gain greater control
over my lif e. . .
The five published autobiographical narratives of the
acquisition of literacy examined in this chapter dramatize
I
this macrotext in a variety of ways. My analysis does not j
follow the chronological order of publication, but is J
organized according the variation of each text's
representation of this myth. j
At the same time these dramatizations of events in the
acquisition and use of literacy represent the myth of
literacy as a path to autonomy, the very act of writing the
64
"aiJtfoBiograpTrical narrative ihsel~f~'is a re-enactment of-the
myth. For these writers, writing an autobiography is a way
to use literacy to gain the autonomy to say who they are and
what their lives mean. Writing the autobiography becomes a
path to autonomy. I will call this version of the myth the
"autobiography to autonomy myth" to distinguish it, as the
myth which motivates the autobiography itself, from the myth
which supplies the structure and content for the
autobiography, the "literacy for autonomy" myth.
John Stuart Mill' s Autobiography
Two characteristics of John Stuart Mill's account of
his literacy instruction and development as a writer qualify
his autobiography as a paradigmatic narrative of the
acquisition of literacy. His explicit and reflective
discussion of the efficacy of his literacy instruction,
accompanied by concrete and specific detail, and his
chronological organization make this narrative an especially
suitable elaboration of the macrotext presented above in its
abstract forms.
My analysis of this autobiography will be divided into
two main sections. In the first, I will give a general
outline of Mill's development as a reader and writer. I
will highlight the structures and contents of the
Autobiography which represent the literacy for autonomy
myth. In the second section, I will note differences
65
between the Early Draft of~the Autobiography and”"the fana'I"
version of the Autobiography in order to show how Mill's
autobiography re-enacts the autobiography for autonomy myth.
Mill begins his account with a description of his
instruction in skills. In this portion, his attention is
centered on formal features of the literacy setting: the
scene, the materials, the techniques, and an other (his
father) as the director or controller of the situation.
This section establishes his father's influence both as a
model and as an instructor by noting such details as having
shared his father's writing table. The focus is on the
particulars of the instructional routine; for example, he
tells how during their walks together before breakfast, the
typical exchange began with his summary and report on the
reading he had done on his own, after which his father
would explain and clarify issues and ideas from the reading,
and he would in turn be expected to summarize his father's
commentary. From this description he moves to an accounting
of his practice of the skills, making an extended list of
his reading and writing exercises at this stage of his
development. Up to this point, instruction in literacy was
not distinguished from the practice of literacy.
But when Mill began habitually writing histories
(compilations from the various historians he had read), the
two steps in the process of becoming literate were more
easily separated. His father encouraged but did not compel
66
him in this pastime and never asked to read what he had
written. The practice of the skills led eventually to an
awareness of himself as a skillful writer and reader.
Mill marked a transition in his instruction occurring
at about age twelve: the main object was no longer the "aids
and appliances of thought" but the thoughts themselves. He
was developing an awareness of himself as a literate person
which gave him the confidence to seek ways to use his
literacy for his own ends. That Mill recognized an
increasing confidence in' himself and in his ability to
develop his own set of principles and purposes after his
return from his trip to France at age fourteen is reflected
in his title for the third chapter of his autobiography,
"Last Stage of Education and First Stage of Self-Education."
Mill called the reading of Bentham1s spec\ilations (as
interpreted by Dummont) a "turning point" in his mental
history, for Bentham’s principle of utility gave unity to
his conceptions of things:
I now had opinions, a creed, a doctrine; a philosophy; j
in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; j
the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made
the outward purpose of life (69) .
This newly created coherence was essential to his developing
sense of control over his own education.
The increasing independence of his literacy is also
noted in his movement from being under his father’s singular
influence to being influenced by his father's friends, and
67
his friendship with Charles Austin, with whom Mill found
himself "not a pupil under teachers, but a man among men. "
Mill's awareness of himself as a literate person led to
his awareness of the uses of literacy when, at age
seventeen, he went to work for the East India Company and
first used his writing skills to make a living. And his
concurrent involvement, with his father, in the
establishment of the Westminster Review gave him a new
awareness of the power to influence opinion accessible to
those involved in publishing.
This led back to the beginning of the recursive process
and its focus on skills acquisition. Of his experience in
editing Bentham1s "Rationale of Judicial Evidence" at age
eighteen, Mill said that he not only came to _ understand
Bentham's doctrines better, but also learned to imitate
another writer's style. He supplemented this with reading
master stylists such as Goldsmith, Fielding, Pascal, and
Voltaire with the result that
my writing lost the jejuneness of my early composition,
the bones and cartilages began to clothe themselves ;
with flesh, and the style became, at times, lively and I
almost light (119). j
i
This conscious perfecting of style suggests a growing j
confidence in identifying himself as a writer. j
»
!
Mill testifies to his increasing autonomy as a thinker
and writer when he says of his contributions to commentaries
on parliamentary debates which his father and friends
published as "Parliamentary History and Review"
68
These writings were no longer mere reproductions and
applications of the doctrines I had been taught; they
were original thinking, as far as that name can be
applied to old ideas in new forms and connexions; and I
do not exceed the truth in saying that there was a
maturity, and a well-digested character about them,
which there had not been in any of my previous
performances (121/123).
Another factor contributing to his growing confidence
that his opinions were his own was his organization of and
involvement in a study group formed for the purpose of
meeting and closely analyzing readings in the sciences, of
which Mill says, "I have always dated from those
conversations my own real inauguration as an original and
independent thinker" (127) .
His confidence in himself as a literate person led him
to seek ways to use his literacy for his own ends. This
search eventually forced him to examine his reasons for
being and culminated in a mental or emotional crisis when
he was twenty. He believed he was incapable of feeling and
that his life had no meaning. He blamed the "mental crisis"
on his education.
My education, I thought, had failed to create these
feelings in sufficient strength to resist the
dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole
course of my intellectual cultivation had made
precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit
of my mind (143 ) .
His break from this melancholy came in reading Monmartel's
"Memoires." It was reading the life of another--not
another's ideas, philosophies, or system of thought--that
allowed him to experience feeling for the first time in a
69
‘long time. From tETs7 MiTT s a id~~ he learned to give
attention to the "internal culture of the individual," which
was accomplished by a new program of reading including
Carlyle, Byron, and Wordsworth. Blaming his education had
been the same as blaming his father for the crisis, so
included in the remedy was the reading of authors of whom
his father would not approve.
The outcome of the crisis was a new determination to
get control of his own life. This program of reading was a
way not only to take control of his exercise of his literacy
skills, but also to use those skills to work his way out of
his depression. Once the crisis passed, the recursive
process resumed and continued throughout his life as
reported in the autobiography.
Alan Ryan has cautioned, in J. S. Mi 11, that the
autobiography is "not a work to be relied on as evidence
about Mill's education and the effect of that education upon
him; it tells us what he thought about his education
looking back on it, not what his educational experiences
actually were" (9). I would amend this caution only by
saying that what Mill's educational experiences "actually
were" is not simply undiscoverable, it is knowable only as
the "thoughts" of individuals.
Mill himself recognized this in the opening statement
of his purposes:
70
I do not for a moment imagine that any part of what I
have to relate, can be interesting to the public as a
narrative, or as being connected with myself. But I
have thought that in an age in which education, and its
improvement, are the subject of more, if not of
profounder study than at any former period of English
history, it may be useful that there should be some
record of an education which was unusual and remarkable
. . . there may be somewhat both of interest and of
benefit in noting the successive phases of any mind
which was always pressing forward. . . (I) desire to
make acknowledgment of the debts which my intellectual
and moral development owes to other persons (5) .
The third purpose he named in his opening statement,
the acknowledgment of intellectual debts, was not explicitly
stated in the Early Draft of the Autobiography. In the
analysis which follows I will examine the differences in the
two versions, as well as the differences indicated by the
Rejected Leaves of the Early Draft of the Autobiography2 in
order to reinforce the point that different versions of the
narrative reflect different versions of reality insofar as
they indicate the writer's effort to create, control, and
understand his life. The multiple versions and the fact
that Mill saved the rejected leaves of the early draft
suggest Mill's awareness of the power of language to shape
reality and his own ambivalence about which version of
reality he preferred to present.
Two topics which receive considerably different
treatment in the two versions are the nature of Mill's
relationship with his father and the nature of his
relationship with Harriet Taylor. While these have been the
subject of considerable scholarly interest and speculation,
71
T wiTT lTmTt my own interpretation to evidence MiTT-
provides in the Autobiography, the Early Draft, and the
Early Draft Rejected Leaves, and refer readers dissatisfied
with my interpretations to other commentators.2
Mill adds an extended passage about his father's
instructional practices to his final version of his
autobiography. This passage is a reflection on the
"deficiencies" in Mill's education: "principally in the
things which boys learned from being turned out to shift for
themselves, and from being brought together in large
numbers" (39). These things included physical exercise,
manual dexterity, and an attention to practical details.
Mill's inclusion of this passage reflects his awareness of
his early dependence on his father. Here he seems to seek
to blame his father for not only his physical deficiencies,
which resulted from this dependence, but for the dependence
itself as well.
Another significant change between the Early Draft and
the Autobi ography is the provision of a transitional
sentence between his description of his father as he
appeared to the public and his own perceptions of him. The
Early Draft makes only an abrupt transition with a word,
"Personally" (52). The transition in the Autobi ography
reinforces Mill's later theme of recognition of and
evaluation of influences on his moral and intellectual
development:
72 .
It will be admitted, that a man of the opinions, and
the character, above described, was likely to leave a
strong moral impression on any mind principally formed
by him, and that his moral teaching was not likely to
err on the side of laxity or indulgence. The element
which was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to
his children, was that of tenderness. I do not believe
that this deficiency lay in his own nature. I believe
him to have had much more feeling than he habitually
showed ( 53 ) .
Apparently, for Mill,, revising the earlier draft of his
autobiography was a chance for him to reevaluate and
reinterpret the meaning of his experience.
Regarding the influence of his peers, Mill devotes
several pages of the Early Draft to Roebuck, but they are
eliminated from the final draft. They are replaced,
however, by the addition of several more lines on Sterling.
These changes are another indication of the re-evaluation
occasioned by the revision of the autobiography taken up
after several years had passed.
The Autobiography adds credit to his wife for the
’ ’practicality" of his writings and omits the Early, Draft
attribution to her of the development of "poetic culture" in
him. Then following this, Mill makes another assertion of
his autonomy over his own writing, saying that his wife’s
influence was "only one among many which were helping to
I
shape the character of my future development." Even when it j
i
later became the "presiding principle of my mental progress,
it did not alter the path, but only made me move forward
more boldly and at the same time more cautiously in the same
course" (199).
73
This and-other Tiber a 1 praise of-Ki s wiTfe”' s Influences
on his writing suggest more strongly Mill's own confidence
in his ability to use his literacy to control his life than
would have a detailed accounting of which ideas were his and
which had been hers. For if Mill had felt compelled to give
such an account, it would have only served to contradict his
declaration that they were of very like mind as well as
raise suspicions as to his true feelings about her editorial
contributions. As it is, he appears generous, even
chivalrous. Likewise, the telescoped nature of the account
of his literary productivity after his wife's death, rather
than making this work seem less important or extensive than
his early accomplishments, actually indicates his confidence
in his own control over his writing. Writing the
Autobiography was finally a way to assign credit where
credit was due, not only to others, but also to himself.
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X, as a revolutionary in the struggle to gain
human rights for black people, represents activism against
the domination of black people by white society. For this
reason, one might be reluctant to concur with the claim that
Malcolm X, too, subscribed to what I have identified as a
.white, middle-class mainstream myth. Yet Malcolm X's story,
as he told it to Alex Haley, represents this myth of
74
TlTteracy for autonomy just as weTl as any of the other
stories examined here.3
In the following analysis I will argue that Malcolm X
used the white middle-class myth as a weapon in his fight
for civil rights. That is, he turned the myth against its
source.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, like John Stuart Mill’s
Autobiography, the paradigmatic acquisition of literacy
autobiography, is a continuous, chronologically arranged
narrative in which the father is an important symbolic
figure. Beginning with remembrances of his father's
violent death and ending with his predictions that he too
would be murdered, its organization underscores Malcolm X's
sense of the continuity of history. By drawing this and
other parallels between himself and his father, their
activism for black civil rights for example, Malcolm X
represents himself as carrying on a work his father was
unable to finish. Though his doctrines and methods were
different from his father's, he could be united with him in
his purpose.
This chronological organization also allows us to trace
Malcolm X’s development as a literate person from school
child to internationally recognized human rights activist.
The stages of Malcolm X’s development can be marked by the
names by which he is called and which he assumes for
himself. The names are a sign of not only the identity which
75
he assumes for“lYimseITT, But also the version of reality irT
which he places and by which he explains that identity. The
changes of names are indications of changes in perception of
self and perception of reality.
Malcolm X first discusses aspects of his learning to
read and write in his account of his experiences at Mason
Junior High School while he was living in the Swerlins'
foster home. In this section, however, the actual
acquisition of literacy skills is secondary to his
socialization. Malcolm Little, the only black student in
the class, was so popular among his classmates that he was
asked to join numerous extracurricular organizations. But
the acceptance he enjoyed was an acceptance based on his
difference or uniqueness from his classmates, not on his
equality with them.
Though he knew that as a black boy he was not a part of
the mainstream white society, he believed in and accepted
the mainstream's myth that literacy and education gave one
access to power, privilege, and autonomy. However, when he
revealed his belief that the mainstream myth could be
extended to include him, that his literacy would give him
power too, he learned that those who were part of the
mainstream culture did not believe their reality included
Malcolm Little.
When Mr. Ostrowski, Malcolm X's English teacher, asked
Malcolm what he planned to do after he finished school and
76
"Malcolm replied tha't~he wouIcT-TTke to Be a lawyer, this
teacher advised Malcolm to "be realistic. . . a lawyer--
that's no realistic goal for a nigger" (36). He suggested
that instead Malcolm, the smartest student in his class,
consider being a carpenter.
With this incident, Malcolm X determined that he would
never be part of the white middle-class mainstream. At best
he would be no more than their mascot. He might be elected
as class president in the eighth grade, but he couldn't
aspire to leadership as an adult. He realized, "whatever I
wasn't, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids.
But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their
eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be" (37). His
response, to withdraw from his classmates, friends, and
foster parents, was merely a manifestation of his
recognition that the rewards which they expected for
■themselves were to be withheld from him.
The new identity which Malcolm assumed for himself when
he left Michigan to live with his older half-sister, Ella,
was that of a "Homeboy, " the name given to him by his first
friend in Boston. This marked his real introduction to and
immersion into black culture and the beginning of his street
education. He describes it: "Every day I listened raptly
to customers who felt like talking, and it all added to my
education. . . .1 was thus schooled well" (83). His
teachers were hustlers and criminals. The subjects were
77
the numbers, pimping, con games of many kinds, peddling
dope, and thievery of all sorts, including armed robbery"
(83) .
In his account of this period, Malcolm X reports having
regrets only once--when he became acquainted with Laura, a
serious high school student with dreams of attending
college. Watching her study caused him to reflect that he
"hadn't read even a newspaper since leaving Mason" (60).
His new street life did not require literacy for survival.
Recalling her influence on him, he says,,"sometimes, when
she had gone, I felt let down, thinking how I had turned
away from the books I used to like when I was back in
Michigan" ( 61) .
But he pursued his new alternative education with all
the intelligence and energy he was denied from devoting to
an academic education. His immersion in his street
education led to success on the street. "Detroit Red"
carried on a variety of hustles and other illegal activity
in both Boston and New York City for years until he was
eventually imprisoned for robbery.
Once in prison he resumed, or rather began again, his
acquisition of conventional literacy. His account of his
"homemade education" during his seven years of imprisonment
parallels the "macrotext" sketched out earlier in this
chapter:
I acquired literacy skills. Then I was able to use
these skills. As I used the skills I became aware
78
that I possessed €110111. This awareness led me to an
awareness that I could use my literacy to achieve my
own purposes. Realizing literacy was of use, I
furthered my skills. Once I increased my skills, I
became more confident of them. With increasing
confidence, I used literacy to gain greater control
over my life . . .
This is the macrotext for the white middle-class mainstream
myth that the acquisition of literacy is the path to power
and autonomy. His experience as a junior high school
student had shown Malcolm X that this myth was not intended
to be a part of the reality of a black person. His response
at that time had been to replace it with the success myth of
the ghetto which white-dominated society had created for
black society. Later, as an inmate in the prisons white
society had created for him and others who would not live by
its laws, he responded by embracing the myth and turning it
to use against those who were its source.
In the Charlestown Prison, where "Satan" was first
incarcerated, Malcolm X began to read again in an effort to
emulate a fellow inmate, Bimbi, who was able to "command
total respect . . . with his words" (154). He began
correspondence courses in the mechanics of English grammar
and in Latin. But though he was motivated to increase his
skills by an awareness of their utility, he was frustrated
by his inability to read with comprehension. Because his
habit was to skip words he did not know, he had little
understanding of what he was reading, and ended up merely
going through "book reading motions." Of this stage in his
79
I acquisition of literacy, he says, "Pretty soon, I would have
J quit even these motions, unless I had received the
motivation that I did" (171).
This "motivation," came as a result of being introduced
I
I
i by his brother Philbert to the Black Muslim religion and the
! teachings of Elijah Muhammad after his transfer to Concord
; Prison. He was motivated by needing to be able to read and
I
| write in order to carry on a correspondence with his
brothers and sisters as well as with Elijah Muhmammad
himself. Through this correspondence he found a way to
' fight against white society for his human rights. The
i
1 correspondence began with that first one-page letter which
he wrote at least twenty five times, trying to make it
legible and understandable. Remembering the inadequacy of
i
| his skills at this time, he reports, "I practically couldn't
1 read my handwriting myself; it shames even to remember it.
i
My spelling and my grammar were as bad, if not worse" (169) .
This frustration and concern with the very mechanics of
| writing is typical of one who does not yet have control over
! his own literacy practices. What is important is that he j
i
! did not let the frustration stop him, but instead practiced
the literacy skills repeatedly until, eventually, he was not
i only writing a letter a day to Elijah Muhammad and a letter
a day to one or another of his brothers and sisters, but was
also writing to the people he had known on the streets in
Harlem. His sense that this practice of literacy was
80
! changing him, that he was becoming a literate person, is |
i
j reflected in his remark that the hustlers to whom he wrote
; were "too uneducated to write a letter . . . privately, they
: would get someone else to read a letter if they received
one" (170) .
His awareness of himself as literate led to a growing
confidence that he could use his literacy to bring about
: further changes in his life. Wanting to express himself
more clearly in his letters, he began his program of copying
from the dictionary--"to study, to learn some words ... to
improve my penmanship" (172).
He designed and carried out this unique program of
study without instructional help from any one else or any
materials other than tablets and pencils and the dictionary
j itself. It was totally self-motivated and it was effective.
I
! As he reports, he could "for the first time pick up a book
and read and now begin to understand what the book was
' saying" (173). To describe the effect of this new awareness
of his literacy, he uses such expressions as "a new world
that opened" and makes such remarks as "I had never been so
truly free in my life" (173 ) .
Though he notes that "an inmate was smiled upon if he
demonstrated an unusually intense interest in books" (173),
I
j this self-imposed adult literacy program was not carried out
! to please or impress prison officials and parole boards.
! His description of his "really serious reading" after hours
81
during 'lights out' makes it clear that his effort to
acquire literacy was an act of defiance against not just the
!
| prison regulations, but the entire social system which had
made him into a prisoner.
He read everything from Will Durant’s Story of
Civilization to Mendel's Findings in Genetics in order to
find information or facts he could use to back up his
I
I denunciation of white supremacy. Of the ultimate effect of
his self-directed education in the evils that white people
had perpetrated upon black people, he says:
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that
reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison
that reading had changed forever the course of my
life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke
inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally
alive. I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way
a college confers a status symbol upon its students,
i My homemade education gave me, with every additional
I book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the
i deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting
the black race in America. . . .You will never catch
me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not
j studying something I feel might be able to help the
black man (179).
He was reading and writing not merely in defiance of
and rebellion against the white mainstream's system of
i
| justice, but in an effort to effect a change in that
I
J system, by awakening other blacks to an awareness of the
i
self-hatred white domination had taught them. This was the j
!
literacy program he carried on once he was out of prison
and working as "Minister Malcolm X," Black Muslim and
' follower of the prophet Elijah Muhammad.
i
82
j The same intelligence and energy that he directed into
this educational purpose was in the last months of his life
directed into his search for the true religion of Islam.
Assuming a new name, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz assumed a new
identity in a new version of reality as a result of his
pilgrimage to Mecca. This reality, or myth, explained life
not in terms of black versus white, but in terms of the
"brotherhood of all men" regardless of race and nationality.
One of his first acts upon receiving this new vision was to
write letters--to his wife, to his sister Ella, to Elijah
Muhammad's son Wallace, and an open letter to his assistants
in his newly formed organization, "with a note appended,
asking that [his] letter be duplicated and distributed to
the press" (339). Beginning with a letter to an audience of
I one and ending with a letter to an unnumbered public
audience, Malcolm X's acquisition of literacy had indeed
been the path to power and autonomy.
Hunger of Memory
Richard Rodriguez' autobiography, Hunger of Memory: The j
Education of Richard Rodriguez, is not a chronologically
organized extended narrative like that of Mill. Its
contents are selected incidents which might be better
characterized as descriptive than as narrative. The loose
organization under thematic headings such as "Achievement of
i
t
Desire," "Credo," "Complexion," and "Profession" does not
83
["conform as easily to a macroplot analysis and comparison as
\ did Mill's story. However, Rodriguez has chosen to relate
incidents which can be placed within the context of a
; macroplot.
| Rodriguez, in his account of his acquisition of
i
literacy, makes more explicit his own awareness of his
literacy than did Mill. Whereas Mill reports particular
i
I details of the acquisition of literacy skills and his
I
practice of literacy, Rodriguez abstractly reflects on his
developing awareness of himself as a literate person and of
j the consequences of literacy. Nevertheless, each of the
| incidents he related can be located within the
; schematization of the recursive process of literacy
presented earlier in this chapter.
j There is one difference between Mill and Rodriguez more
j
| significant than the differences in organization and in
f
' focus, however. Mill represents the recursive process of
the acquisition of literacy in a single myth--the myth that
literacy is the path to autonomy. For Rodriguez,
l
acquisition of literacy has brought about another change: it I
j
! has been a force for his alienation from his family and its
culture. His autobiography is devoted to reconciling this
experience of literacy as alienator with his belief in the
middle-class myth of literacy for autonomy.
Rodriguez sketches scenes from his childhood, college
years, and adulthood which depict his alienation from his
i 8 4
culture. He tells stories about how his education, his
acquisition of the skill and his practice of reading was a
force or cause for alienation from his family. One scene
characterizes this conflict between belief and experience
i
! with special point and pertinence. Rodriguez's description,
i
i
I organized to reflect the conflict between the two kinds of
i
j changes effected by literacy, moves back and forth from a
i
t
portrayal of alienation from family to a characterization of
a growing sense of power.
After dinner, I would rush to a bedroom with papers
and books. . .1 kept so much, so often, to myself.
Sad. Enthusiastic. Troubled by the excitement of
coming up on new ideas. Eager. Fascinated by the
promising texture of a brand-new book. I hoarded the
pleasures of learning. Alone for hours. Enthralled.
Nervous. I rarely looked away from my books--or back
on my memories. Nights when relatives visited and the
front rooms were warmed by Spanish sounds, I slipped
quietly out of the house (51) .
Each description of a stage of learning and each
account of achievement of success in school is counter
pointed by a description of his increasing alienation from
! his family. For example, he describes his experience in
the fourth grade in this way:
i
i
Librarians who initially frowned when I checked out
the maximum ten books at a time started saving books
they thought I might like. Teachers would say to the
rest of the class, 'I only wish the rest of you took
reading as seriously as Richard obviously does.' But
at home I would hear my mother wondering, 'What do you
see in your books? ' ( 51) .
Rodriguez repeats the theme later in discussing his
choice of colleges, noting that his departure for Stanford
85
| would "only make physically apparent the separation that
I had occurred long before" (57). And once he was at
! college, he says, he realized that literacy had alienated
i him not only from his family, but from other Chicanos as
well. Though he was invited to Chicano student meetings and
social events sponsored by La Raza, he never went, for he
felt he was different from other minority students, who
were "proud, claiming that they didn't need to change by
becoming students" while he had "long before accepted the
: fact that education exacted a great price for its equally
1
I
great benefits" (160).
These accounts of his experience of literacy as
alienator are balanced throughout the autobiography by
I
j accounts of his growing sense of autonomy resulting from
I
. his practice of literacy and his awareness of himself as a
j literate person. In reporting how he raised his hand and
volunteered an answer in school for the first time,
Rodriguez represents himself as in control.
I spoke out in a loud voice. And did not think it
I remarkable when the entire class understood. That
| day, I moved very far from the disadvantaged child I
| had been only days earlier. The belief, the calming
i assurance that I belonged in public, had at last taken
hold (22).
Though experience was showing him that literacy was a
negative force which brought the pain of alienation, his
i
! education was giving him a faith that literacy was a
| positive force which would bring him power. The change
would come, yes, but it would be for the better.
86
; In the above-cited instances, the alienation is
i
described concretely; elsewhere, the promise of autonomy or
"success" is presented abstractly, as in the following
passages:
What did I see in my books? I had the idea that they
| were crucial for my academic success, though I
i couldn't have said exactly how or why.
I entered high school having read hundreds of books.
My habit of reading made me a confident speaker and
writer of English.
Again in college,
The odd thing was that in the classroom teachers
| reminded me of both my public identity and power as a
I student of literature (156).
But always there had been the awareness that changes
brought about by literacy had meant not only the gain of
power and autonomy, but the loss of intimacy.
Like Mill, Richard Rodriguez found in his literacy
I
j skills the means by which he could change his life. But
for Rodriguez the awareness of himself as a literate person
was easier to accept than the awareness that his use of
those skills to read nineteenth century novels and write
essays could separate him from that life he once shared
! with his family. The same actions by which he had once
I
earned his parents' approval were now making him not only
less dependent upon their approval, but less approving of
them.
The docile, obedient student came home a shrill and
precocious son who insisted on correcting and teaching
his parents with the remark: 'My teacher told us. . . 1
F~ I grew increasingly successful, a talkative student^ I
! My hand was raised in the classroom. . . .At home,
I life was less noisy than it had been (50) .
i
He became a public person at the expense of his
private identity. Rather than succumb to the confusion of
measuring his belief that literacy would bring him power
| against his experience that he did not have the power to
| stop literacy from alienating him from his family, he
reconciles the conflict by fashioning an explanation for
it. He asserts that alienation is necessary and
; unavoidable. He claims that everyone must sacrifice his
private identity in favor of his public identity and that
this sacrifice is a necessary and natural part of
maturation for anyone.
! Rather than rejecting the mainstream myth, he resolves
> I
i the conflict between his regret at "losing" his cultural
!
identification as a Chicano and his desire for gaining
access to the power of middle class identification. He
i develops the thesis that replacement of the private self
1 with the public self is necessary not just for the minority
! 1
working class child, but for everyone who wishes to achieve
a sense of autonomy and individuality.
It is not possible for a child--any child--ever to use
his family’s language in school. Not to understand
this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling
and to trivialize the nature of intimate life--a
j family's language (12).
Only when I was no longer an alien in gringo society
J could I seek the rights and opportunites necessary for
full public individuality (27).
88
p Rodriguez has used his literacy skills to accomplish
! this reconciliation. He has written about it. In his
| preface, he explains: "In singing the praise of my
! lower-class past, I remind myself of my separation from
that past, bring memory to silence" (6). A subsequent
statement indicates a similar use of his literacy skills:
"If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally
j separated from my parents, my education finally had given
| me ways of speaking and caring about that fact" (72).
i Rodriguez makes this more explicit in his last
chapter. Having given a brief account of his development
! as a writer, measuring that development by his ability to
I
j write for an anonymous reader, he explains how he is using
*
j the autobiography itself:
For by rendering feelings in words that a stranger can
: understand--words that belong to the public, this
; Other--the young diarist no longer need feel all alone
or eccentric. His feelings are capable of public
intelligibility.' In turn, the act of revelation helps
the writer better understand his own feelings. Such
is the benefit of language: By finding public words to
describe one's feelings, one can describe oneself to
oneself. One names what was previously only darkly
felt (187).
i i
From his early education, he says, he remembers more
; reading than writing. This suggests that when he was a
i
child his idea of education and its benefits was limited to j
I
i
the acquisition of knowledge, and reading was for him "the
key to 'knowledge'. . .an activity I thought of as a kind
of report, evidence of learning" (181)
89
That the young Richard Rodriguez used literacy skills
to acquire knowledge and then demonstrates that knowledge
i
reflects his lack of a sense of power over his life.
Rodriguez wanted to be accepted. To achieve this, he was
I
i willing to accept the social order and give his energies to
! achieving a place in that order.
j
! Rodriguez' attitude toward and interest in writing,
which he had viewed in his reading phase as utilitarian,
underwent a change when he found his own purposes or his
own uses for the practice of his literacy skills, that is
when he moved from using literacy to fit into society to
using literacy to change society. Throughout the
autobiography, Rodriguez emphasizes that he saw literacy as
a way to greater knowledge; only later, in writing the
j
autobiography itself does he see literacy skills as useful
to gaining power over his own life.
i
! That autobiographical writing is for Richard Rodriguez
j
i
an especially powerful way in which to use his literacy to
shape his reality is reflected in his motivation for
writing the autobiography: "my words were meant for a
public reader. Only because of that reader did the words
come to the page. The reader became my excuse, my reason
for writing" (187).
| He claims that his inclination to write about his
i
private life in this public voice is related to his ability
to do so: "It is not enough to say that my mother and
90
| father do not want to write their autobiographies. It
needs also to be said that they are unable to write to a
public reader. They lack the skill" (187). In this
passage Rodriguez clearly represents his awareness of
himself as a literate person.
I do not claim or assume that Richard Rodriguez is
representative of his class/culture. It would be
presumptuous of me to do so. However, Rodriguez clearly
considers himself representative-representative not of the
Mexican American but of the middle class. And he
identifies himself with the middle class culture most
j clearly when he adopts its myth for literacy. This middle
class myth is that literacy is positive, for it gives one
autonomy. Richard Rodriguez achieves that autonomy in
claiming a public individuality by the act of writing his
; intellectual autobiography.
I Hunger of Memory is presented not as a guidebook for
Mexican American youth who wish to attain "success" in the
Anglo dominated middle class but as a representative
anecdote— a typical example— of, to use Rodriguez' own
I
i term, a parable of middle class man.
Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a
Girlhood Among Ghosts, like Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of
j Memory, is not the extended chronological, coherent
91
j narrative suggested by the paradigm of the acquisition of
t
i
,literacy. There are, however, acceptable differences in
! the ways accounts of learning to read and write may figure
!
| in autobiographical works and still conform to the
macroplot I have identified. While Hunger of Memory is a
collection of remembrances held together by reflective
expository and argumentative passages, The Woman Warrior is
a progression of highly dramatized narratives building on
each other as they depict a mounting conflict between
cultures and an ultimate resolution of that conflict in the
author's lif e .
While Richard Rodriguez uses his autobiography to
! reason out a way to merge conflicting cultures into a
| single myth, truly becoming "mainstreamed," Maxine Hong
! Kingston uses her autobiography as a way to imaginatively
1 bridge two cultures and their separate versions of reality.
i
! My metaphors are chosen to illustrate the difference in the
I
i authors' notions of what it is to have an inter-ethnic
identity. Richard Rodriguez would blend his two cultures
so that both lost their distinctiveness in creating a new
culture. Maxine Hong Kingston does not seek to make the
Chinese culture more American nor the American culture more
I Chinese. She attempts, not to reconcile one to another or
j subordinate one to another, but to give equal validity to
I !
j both through articulation.
92
1 The particular details Kingston relates in her
; accounts of her schooling experience and other experiences
|
of learning to read and write are chosen to highlight this
difference of cultures and her observation of one from the
j perspective of another. Her ideographic description of
!
i English words such as "I" and "here" and subtle jokes about
having had a "zero IQ" as a first grader and later
"improving" that IQ underscore her cross-cultural
perspective.
These and other elements of Kingston's acquisition of
both Chinese and American literacy are interesting
j considerations in and of themselves, but there is another
j aspect of Kingston's work more critical to my exploration
here. That is its character as an example of an author
using autobiography to articulate between two conflicting
I
I
! versions of reality. The particulars of her story are, to
i
t
i
i a degree, less interesting than her telling of that story.
I
Kingston's narration brings together "reality" and "myth"
from the perspectives of both the Chinese culture and
American culture. Because she mixes what is accepted as
American reality with Chinese myth, readers begin to see
t
I that both are real and both are mythical. She encourages
her readers to question their knowledge of "facts" and to
substitute belief for knowledge.
! For Kingston, writing the autobiography or talking
story is a way to create her own unique cross-cultural
93
Chinese American reality/myth. She is willing to break
traditions and taboos of either culture to do this. In
i
telling the story about "No Name Woman, " the aunt her
| mother had warned her to never mention to anyone, she
I breaks the Chinese taboo of speaking about the dead and
I
I
! also breaks the Western taboo against failing to
! distinguish "fiction" from "fact" or imagined events from
i
I historical events.
The response of one critical reader, Susan Juhasz, is
to resolve the conflict between fact and fantasy by calling
Kingston’s material "the truth of the imagination" (62).
• And Debra Homsher has called The Woman Warrior a
I :-
j "bridge between autobiography and fiction."
| Kingston links inherited stories with explication and
: memories of her own. She also works to see these
! people clearly, trying to construct a picture of her
1 relatives from fragments and to enter their world in
much the same way that a sympathetic reader would. She
is as involved in this process of learning as we are
(98).
But Kingston's autobiography is more than a bridge between
! two different genres, one taking its material from
i
historical events and the other taking its material from |
the imagination. Kingston builds a bridge which we as
readers can use to cross over to view, momentarily at
least, our own cultures from the perspective of another. We
know the Chinese version of reality and of myth. And we
I
know the American version of reality and of myth.
94
Kingston relates the failure of attempts to measure
Chinese customs against American standards, and vice-versa.
She learns to accept both cultures as possible realities
when she realizes she can't use the American version of
reality to refute her mother's Chinese version.
! Typical of this dual representation of reality and
myth is Kingston's account of being forced to visit the
neighborhood druggist and demand reparation candy after his
delivery boy had brought medicine to her family's house
when they hadn't ordered any. Kingston's mother insists
that the delivery boy was a Delivery Ghost who had come to
curse their house. Kingston and her brothers and sisters,
i
from their Western point of view, see it as a simple
mistake. As the oldest child, Kingston is selected to
represent the family in demanding reparation for this
offense. Her mother instructs her to ask for reparation
candy, but Kingston knows the druggist will not understand.
She also knows her mother will never understand that there
was no intention to bring a curse on the family. She has
to work out a way to articulate the opposing interpre
tations of the delivery boy's visit.
Through her autobiography Kingston offers a model of a
cross-cultural identity by offering a model for creating a
cross-cultural identity. The writing and reading of the
work is a self-reflexive act. In constructing the account
of particular ways one person spanned the gulf between
95
! American and Chinese cultures, writer and reader re-enact
' the spanning. That Kingston has done this so well does not
1
imply that she has done it easily or painlessly. After
relating the anguishing scene at the family dinner table,
which climaxes the narrative of her attempt to confess to
! her mother every item on her list of wrongdoing, Kingston
j
I warns her reader, "Be careful what you say. It comes true.
I
It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the
world logically, logic the new way of seeing"(237) .
But she finds she must say something, "The throat pain
t always returns, though, unless I tell what I really think,
l
| whether or not I lose my job, or spit out gaucheries all
i
over a party" (239). As she has said elsewhere, she writes
for herself as much as for another audience:
i
i
When I write most deeply, fly the highest, reach the
| furthest, I write like a diarist--that is, my audience
; is myself. I dare to write anything because I can
i burn my papers at any moment. . . .Pragmatically,
| though . . . I work on intelligiblity and acces-
I sibility in a second draft ("Cultural Mis-reading by
i American Reviewers" )
f '
Kingston is the interpreter and guide for the
cross-cultural experience of reading her autobiography.
The story of the poetess Ts1 ai Yen, with which she ends the
i
| book, suggests this role in which Kingston casts herself.
, I
Like Ts ai Yen, and like her own mother, she has been taken '
i
to live among barbarians who do not understand her and whom |
she does not understand. (Which of Kingston's two cultures
| corresponds to "the barbarians" and which to Ts'ai Yen's
i
I 96
own people makes little difference.) Like Ts'ai Yen,
Kingston has found a way to put her own words to the
■ barbarian music: "Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the
| barbarians understood their sadness and anger" (243).
j Kingston accomplishes this by writing her auto
biography. Borrowing from her Chinese heritage, Kingston
represents herself achieving understanding and control over
her life through writing about it. She has adapted her
mother's way of "talking story" to arrive at meaning.
I
! Kingston’s version of the literacy for autonomy myth and
i
j macrotext is, like the other autobiographies examined here,
, a re-enactment of the correlate myth of autobiography for
I autonomy.
i
I When the poetess Ts'ai Yen was returned to her own
i
j people, she brought her songs back with her. One of the
j three which have been passed down, Kingston says, is a song
j the Chinese sing to their own instruments. "It translated
| well"--as does Kingston1 s story of The Woman Warrior.
I
I
j Education of Henry Adams
i
, The Education of Henry Adams is of special interest as
| an autobiographical account of the acquisition of literacy
because its author claimed that his education was a
failure--yet in the act of making that claim by writing his
I
I account of the failure, he seemed to be contradicting
|
97
j himself! As Robert Sayre has observed,
j The image of disorder is so clearly presented and the
i search for education so enfolding that the book builds
t and informs even as it despairs (The Examined Self,
1 201).
I
j There are two reasons why this seems to be a contradic-
tion--one is that we as readers tend to equate
education with literacy, while Adams does not. The second
reason is that we often have such faith in the efficacy of
our educational institutions that we have difficulty
believing that anyone who received the "best of
j educations"--both formally and through experience--could
I call that education a failure. I will explore the second
i
of these two reasons first, then give a short analysis of
Henry Adams's narrative of his education, comparing that
account to his remarks about his acquisition and practice
I
| of literacy.
i Many readers, especially literary critics who are
i
academics, are not eager to hear that even a Harvard
education is inadequate--certainly not when Adams adds to
that the claim that neither was "experience" an adequate
education. Henry Adams manages to attack all of those
; sources and forces of education in which we have great
faith: schools, parents, and experience. The response of j
i
such critics is to interpret the Education as ironic or to
call it, as William Dusinberre has, "a purposeful travesty
of the meaning of Adams's life" (Henry Adams: The Myth of
I
j
i 98
1 Failure, 1). To explain Adam's reasons for making such a
i
{ travesty, Dusinberre argues that Adams contrived in the
Education to deceive his readers into believing he had
never had any literary ambition in order to conceal his own
disappointment. Dusinberre concludes that "Henry Adams's
failure was, in great measure, myth" (221).
From his early account of being walked to school by
| his Grandfather Adams, through his discussion of his and
I his parents' tacit assumptions that he would attend
Harvard, to his account of sitting in class with German
schoolboys trying to learn the German language, Adams shows
i himself as expecting education to be given to him--or,
perhaps, forced on him. In his telling of each of- these
incidents and many others in his narrative of his
j education, he portrays himself as passive and subject to
j forces outside himself.
i
! It is the same in his discussion of the lessons of the
school of experience. During his stay in Berlin he found
that he did not "soak up" German culture, but that
understanding it required some effort on his part--an
effort which he was largely unwilling to expend. Adams
even goes so far as to claim that his "only clear gain. .
.came from time wasted, studies neglected; vices indulged";
it came from the beer-garden and music-hall, "accidentally,
unintended, unforeseen" (80) when he suddenly became aware
99
I that he was following a Beethoven symphony with
|
; understanding even though he had never studied the music.
And where the role of his parents in his education was
i
J concerned, Adams seemed to expect that they would give him
j whatever guidance schools and experience failed to provide,
i
even though he was not always disposed to follow that
advice.
But Adams does not in the end say that it is not
possible to become educated. For Adams discovered that the
only effective source and/or force of education was
himself. Throughout that period of his life covered by the
first nineteen chapters of the Education, Adams had viewed
i
i his education as a process worked upon him. In recording
| this period, he consistently portrays himself as watching
| rather than doing in order to learn.
1 That he was able to not only get by but accomplish
I
l
| much--in fact, to write the History which many scholars
j consider his most important work--only reinforces the point
I that Adams attempts to make in his account of his
j education. What education he was able to receive in this
| passive way was certainly adequate to make him able to
function in his society and even to gain some distinction
it in. But as R. P. Blackmur notes, "If we assume that
an education means the acquisition of skills and the
mastery of tools designed for intelligent reaction in a
i given context, it will appear that Adams's failure in
|
100
! American political society after the Civil War was a
| failure in education" (Henry Adams, 5). Such an education
| was inadequate to Adams himself, because it did not help
him to predict what would happen or to explain things that
i did happen. The best of educations, the best of families
and privilege, the most interesting of experiences had not
been adequate to explain what he saw happening around him
and in his own life.
A change in him begins to be apparent in the chapter
i
I "Failure." It is at this point that he begins his real
education--one he could, ultimately, term a success. For
it is at this point that he begins to try to figure things
out for himself. Chapters XXV through XXXV, which one
scholar has dismissed as "inconsequential theorizing"
(Dusinberre, 2), are in fact a portrayal of Adams in the
process of working out an explanation of his own. Or as
I
Adams himself put it,
Every man with self-respect enough to become
effective, if only as a machine, has had to account to
himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula
of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas
failed. There, whether finished or not, education
stopped (472).
i
i
1 That "formula of his own" was Adams's "Dynamic Theory of
History." I won't attempt to explicate or explain that
dynamic theory of history here, but will only observe that
Henry Adams was satisfied that he was on to something and
I
; could explain things to his own satisfaction.
101
This story of Adams's education is portrayed against
the background design of his acquisition of literacy.
| Adams's acquisition of education and his acquisition of
literacy follow a similar pattern, yet are not parallel.
Of his acquisition and practice of literacy skills in
his childhood, Adams says very little. He first gives
attention to the place of reading and writing in his life
when he gives an account of his writing for the College
Magazine at Harvard, a literacy practice directed not by
his academic curriculum but by his own purposes:
So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not succeed
I as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond
1 improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the
! single ambition which otherwise would scarcely have
j seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was
j the last remnant of the Old Unitarian supremacy. He
j took to the pen. He wrote (66) .
| Later in the narrative, Adams makes mention of the
I
J essays written for the North American Review and other
l
j publications. But his mention of this usually focusses on
!
j the essays' publication rather than his writing of them,
i
suggesting that he needed this public recognition in order
to see himself as a writer, to come to awareness of himself
as a literate person.
Adams's most specific references to activities of
reading and writing are made in those very chapters in
which he depicts himself taking over his own education at
the age of sixty-two. Of the way writing serves as a
102
discovery process during this period, he says:
the pen becomes a sort of blind-man's dog, to keep him
from falling into the gutters. The pen works for
- itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic
material over and over again to the form that suits it
best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of
growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too
well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths
and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is
bogged. Then it has to return on its trail, and
recover, if it can, its line of force. The result of
a year's work depends more on what is struck out than
on what is left in; on the sequence of the main lines
; of thought, than on their play or variety (389).
Adams's awareness of the utility of literacy for the
purpose of working out his own theory is evidenced in his
prodigious reading during this same period. Suggestive of
his reliance on his literacy skills to accomplish this
purpose are these descriptions of the Henry Adams persona
! in search of an explanation of force in history:
He covered his desk with magnets, and mapped out their
line of force by compass. Then he read all the books
he could find, and tried in vain to make his lines of
force agree with theirs. The books confounded him.
He could not credit his own understanding (396) .
He could not conceive but that someone, somewhere,
could tell him all about the magnet, if one could but
find the book. . . (397). j
Eventually, Adams gave up reading others' books to {
find an explanation which corroborated his theory and began
instead in his own book an account of how he had attempted
to arrive at understanding. This account, The Education of
Henry Adams, is Adams's "literary experiment" undertaken to
test his dynamic theory of history. Adams found in the
historical narrative a way of accounting for the role of
103
["human energies, beliefs, and action in creating and
! applying force. By adopting the grammatical third person
| skills to create an autobiography which represented
j
self-ref lexively the myth that literacy is the path to
autonomy.
I
i
f
I
voice,
L
104
Chapter Three Notes
1My comparisons of the Early Draft and the
• Autobi ography are based on the texts provided in the
■ Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume I:
| -----------------------------------------------------L ----------------
i Autobiography and Literary Essays, edited by John M. Robson
I and Jack Stillinger and published by the ' University of
j Toronto Press in 1981. This edition, based on the Columbia
MS, is the one from which I quote here.
] 2A. W. Levi discusses the father/son conflict Mill felt
| in "The Mental Crisis of John Stuart Mill" (Psychoanalytic
j Review, 32 (1945), pp. 86-101). Josephine Kamm explores the
nature of the relations between Mill and Harriet Taylor in
John Stuart Mill in Love (London: Gordon and Cremonesi
Publishers, 1977).
3Arnold Rampersad notes in his discussion of black
biography (of blacks by blacks) that because the biographers
! were trained within white institutions, even as they
! recreate black life, they may be the "intellectual agents of
i the very power that inflicted misery on their subjects."
■ ("Biography, Autobiography, and Afro-American Culture," Yale
! Review 73:1 (Oct. 1983), 1-16.
Chapter Four: The Myth of Schooling for Literacy
in Four Student Narratives
Chapters Two and Three laid the foundation and
developed the argument upon which this chapter is built.
In Chapter Two, I argued that autobiographical narratives
could be used as a source of information about the
attitudes, values, and assumptions of the authors of those
narratives.
In Chapter Three I examined the patterns and processes
of the acquisition of literacy as represented in published
autobiographies in order to discover important themes and
motives which would reflect cultural factors such as values
and attitudes. That chapter also served to establish in
part the methodology by which I will analyze the student
narratives which are the subject of Chapter Four.
This fourth chapter describes and reports on a research
project designed and carried out to discover whether
autobiographical narratives of the acquisition of literacy
by student writers share the patterns and processes
identified as elements of the narrative version of the
literacy acquisition macroplot, which is the following:
I acquired literacy skills. Then I was able to use
these skills. As I used the skills I became aware
that I possessed them. This awareness led me to an
awareness that I could use my literacy to achieve my
106
own purposes. Realizing literacy was of use, I
, furthered my skills. Once I increased my skills, I
j became more confident of them. With increasing
; confidence, I used literacy to gain greater control
' over my life . . .
The project was undertaken in an attempt to discover what
are important elements of the cultural context of learning
to read and write.
In order to make this comparison, I am examining
j narratives by "successful" students (defined in terms of
high grades for both written coursework and a holistically
scored final essay exam) and by "unsuccessful" students
(defined in terms of low or failing grades and exam scores).
I have chosen "success" as the basis for analyzing and
classifying the narratives because this measure will focus
! the research on the effectiveness of instructional settings
; and techniques as well as on the assumptions underlying the
structures for these. That is, I feel that I am safe in
assuming that students who are enrolled in the composition
class have as one of their objectives passing the course; as
teacher of the course I share this objective. I also
assume, though it is not an unquestioned assumption, that
the grades assigned to coursework and essay exam scores are
valid measures of the students' ability to read and write.
Everyone involved in creating and defining the situation
assumes and/or intends that ability to write and read is the
basis for determining standards of success.
107
j This academic situation seems to be an appropriate
i
1 place from which to begin an inquiry into common values and
attitudes toward literacy which are held in Western culture.
I
j I will be looking for a correlation between students
I
success as measured by this particular academic situation
and their presentation of themselves and their
j representation of the myth of literacy for autonomy.
!
I
DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT
From over sixty narratives collected from student
!
t
writers I have chosen to examine those from a single section
of a freshman-level writing course (COMP lOlabc and 107) at
I
j the University of Southern California. The narratives
I
j closely analyzed here were written by the two best and two
I poorest writers in the class, as determined by grades for
; coursework and an holistically scored program-wide final
j essay exam. There were twenty students enrolled in this
class, which met during the summer of 1983. (Appendix A
contains these four narratives. Appendix B contains the
nine other essays from the class which were available for
i
: inclusion here.) I was the teacher for this course.
i
I Members of the class were asked to write narratives
i
| dramatizing some event or events in their acquisition of
1 literacy. The instructions for the essay assignment were as
j follows:
Do you remember how and when you learned to read and
108
write? Write a narrative dramatizing one or more
episodes from your experience of learning to read
and/or write. This need not be about school or
school-related experience, though it may be. For
example, did a parent or friend teach you? Did you
i learn in a religious or church-related setting? If you
j know a second language you can write about learning to
read and write in that language (but please write your
narrative in English).
The essay was written during a ninety minute class
period on a Monday, after the students had been given the
written instructions on the preceding Thursday. The class
I
I
j as a whole had discussed the requirements for the assignment
i
■ and had talked together in groups about strategies for
1
; remembering relevant events to write about, choosing events,
i
| and writing their narratives in a ninety-minute period.
i
j The essay was the eighth of ten in a sequence of
writing and reading assignments designed to give practice
and develop skills in critical reading and using a mixture
! of modes in writing for a variety of purposes. Class
I
| discussion, writing assignments, and readings from texts for
I the class, Marilyn Sternglass' Reading, Writing, and
, Reasoning and Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory, centered
| around the themes of education, work, and literacy.
I
i This particular narrative essay assignment is chosen
i
I for analysis here because-its design is especially suited to
i
my purposes. First, as narratives, the essays are texts
suitable for a dramatistic analysis, about which I will say
more in the next section. Secondly, as written
j autobiographical accounts of events in the acquisition of
t
! 109
| literacy, these narratives have the speciaT character• of
j being self-reflexive. That is, they are to some extent
about themselves. In this and other assignments for the
course the students have written about writing and are
learning to write by writing about how they learned to
write. Thirdly, as essays which were elicited in the
I
I
| particular rhetorical situation of a writing course for
academic credit, the narratives have arisen from
circumstances natural to the very setting I am subjecting to
j scrutiny--the academic literacy instructional situation.
j While the narratives of the acquisition of literacy drawn
i
| from the published autobiographies were written for a
j variety of purposes, all of the student narratives have the
| common purpose of fulfilling part of the requirements for
I
j credit for the course. In this situation, this credit is a
j validation of a certain degree or level of literacy.
i
I
! Method of Analysis
i
I
The events to be analyzed have been chosen by the
students themselves. It is important to note that it is the
writers themselves who have , identified the events as
significant. I do not question whether or not the events
j chosen "really were" the most influential or important or
! even memorable. I am interested in finding out what happens
and who is involved in events which seem important to the
writers.
110
To do this, I will be adopting methodology from Kenneth
Burke's dramatism: identifying the narratives as
representative anecdotes, then analyzing each in terms of
the act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose and the ratios
between these elements of the "dramas" or events recounted
in the narratives.
In this particular inquiry, I show that successful and
unsuccessful students choose events which have similar sets
of relationships between the elements of act, agent, agency,
scene, and purpose and that some of these elements have
characteristic, common qualities as well as striking
differences.
| This methodology is well fitted to my purpose because
i
! Burke's pentad does not allow for analysis of an "object" or
I
! recipient of action. That is, there are only agents and
1
| agencies of action. This methodology brings into sharp
focus the role in which the author casts herself, most
particularly her view of herself as actor or acted-upon.
This is especially useful in an analysis which seeks to
identify and measure the development of the writer's sense
of autonomy.
The degree of reflectiveness in the author's telling,
that is, whether the narrated event or the reflection on the
event is the central drama, is not only a matter of the
author's style, but may be seen to be an indication of her
tendency, ability, or determination to turn circumstances in
111
| which she was powerless into ones in which she is powerful
! by turning them into 1 1 learning experiences" or giving them a
I
! singular, personal interpretation.
I
Analysis of Narratives
John, an example of a "successful" student, was
enrolled in COMPlQla. Because of the design of USC's
j COMP101 two-semester sequence, John's essays for the
classroom portion of the course (two-thirds of the course
grade) were ungraded, though I did write evaluative and
descriptive comments on them and discuss my evaluation of
j the quality of John's writing with him. John waived the
I
i second semester of the two-semester course by writing an "A"
i
j essay for the holistically scored final essay exam
J (one-third of the course grade) which is administered
I
i
j program-wide.
; In his narratives John consistently represents himself
j as being in control. (See Appendix A for John's
I
narrative--SN#l.) In Narrative 1A, two events are
dramatized. In the first, the narrator is watching Walter
Cronkite report on the Vietnam War on the CBS Evening News.
I
j He becomes disgusted with the inadequacy of the report and
I
switches off the set. The narrator represents himself as a :
reflective, critical, purposeful TV viewer. He is not
passive.
112
The second event dramatized in the narrative is a
j followup to the first. The narrator reads the newspaper and
j
' di scovers the information lacking in the television report, i
I
! The macroplot for John's narrative is that he (or the John
f
persona) became aware that reading "could be used for more
than just school work."
In the second narrative, IB, John gives an account of
I
i
' another "discovery"--pleasure reading. Reading for his own
| purposes leads to an increasing use of those literacy
I skills. The theme of the narrative reflects the confidence
j resulting from this increased employment of literacy: "This
: experience showed me that I was literate and good at it as
! well." The narrator corroborates Krashen’s comprehensible
input hypothesis. 1
John's third narrative is especially interesting
because the event he dramatized would not be considered a
| "literacy event" according to any formal definition2 since
i
it does not involve the practice of literacy in any way.
He recreates the scene at the meatpacking plant when he
realized that his literacy skills were inadequate for his
own purposes. This kind of event is impossible to duplicate
f
or build into a literacy curriculum. Yet it is clearly of j
i
central importance to John's development as a literate !
person.
j
! In other writing for the course and in conference with
me, John indicated that he had "always had trouble with
113
i English courses," had been enrolled in several different
I
| colleges (he is about twenty-six, as his narrative
i
: mentioning the news report of the Vietnam War suggests), and
|
j is especially fond of reading. In an essay comparing his
own and Richard Rodriguez' sense of isolation as a result
(
of spending great amounts of time reading, John says "I was
not very adept at shooting hoops or running for TD's. So
rather than embarass myself I would slip away and go read
something, anything really."
John identifies himself as coming from a white, upper
middle class academic/professional background. This
cultural background as well as two years of work experience
as "a waiter, meatpacker, truckdriver, and stockroom clerk"
t
| which he describes leads him to conclude in an essay written
! for this course, "The Purpose of College," that ".
' without the benefits that college gives the chances of my
i
t
j having a rewarding job were slim. Now I view getting my
degree as a necessary step towards my becoming a worthwhile
person in society."
The second example of a "successful" student, Gailee,
was a COMPlOlb student. Her work for the course
consistently earned "A's" in my evaluations and she earned
an "A" on the final exam, which required examinees to write
two essays--one a personal experience narrative and another
an academic argumentative essay. (See Appendix A for a brief
114
I description of the USC COMPlOlabc and 107 course design as
i
I
J well as a list of course grades and essay scores in addition
to the full text of the acquisition of literacy narratives
analyzed here.)
In other essays written for the course Gailee
indicated that she comes from a "strongly white-collar,
Puritan work ethic, 'Corporate America' background." In
I
one of these essays written for the course, Gailee
explained that she had returned to college "seeking
stimulation, something to keep me awake through life."
I
J After a semester, she decided to work on a degree in
! journalism after several years of full-time work "in
positions where my entire living depended on my literacy
skills, sometimes in more than one language, sometimes in
terms a computer or an engineer (equally obtuse) could
I
I understand. I have held jobs writing bank manuals, aircraft
design specifications, headlines, and extracts from Soviet
technical journals." Of her reasons for being in college,
; Gailee says this:
I am in college because I want the knowledge. I have
had several jobs of the kind I might expect to get with
a college degree and they have left me with a desire to
stay away from such work. At this point it is not the
job or higher earnings I am seeking my degree for. It j
is really and truly (better late than never) knowledge, j
not in terms of facts, but in terms of the ability to I
think, reason, and live my life in a more satisfying
way that I am seeking.
The essay Gailee wrote to fulfill the in-class
narrative of the acquisition of literacy assignment (see
115
| Appendix A, SN#2) is, like John's, a sequence of narratives
I
j embedded in an expository framework. Gailee opens her essay
with a sentence establishing a basic assumption she expects
her readers to share with her--that the value of literacy is
i
| not an arguable issue— then moves into the expository mode.
! This structure, typical of the English personal essay,
| allows her to create a basic coherence for the several
!
narratives by presenting them as illustrations of her
growing awareness of and appreciation for both herself as a
literate person and the usefulness of her literacy skills.
f
i
j Gailee's essay shares another characteristic with
j John's in that she explicitly identifies for her readers the
j outcome of the events she relates--or the morals of the
| t
j stories. The theme of Narrative 2A, the "power of words,"
I
j is stated explicitly in the first line. The secondary theme
i is that "literacy gives me information about the world so I
i
! [can] avoid uncomfortable situations. That is, literacy
| gives one power over one's life.
I
| Gailee has constructed this narrative in such a way
that there are really two events. The first is the event in
which she represents herself as a victim of her lack not
only of literacy skills, but also of an appreciation for the j
* I
I I
i usefulness of literacy. This event is the dramatized event.
! The second event, which is not dramatized, but which is an
I
j outcome of the first, is her "discovery" or "realization" of
the usefulness of literacy.
116
Such discoveries and realizations, because they are
internal and reflective, are difficult to dramatize because
they are difficult to locate in a time and space. So a
j
I narrative must be fashioned which will serve as a
j representative anecdote.
i
This implies that significant literacy acquisition
events may not be identifiable in the same way as are
literacy events. In developing their definition of a
literacy event, Anderson, Teasle, and Estrada have
distinguished between two types of literacy events: reading
j events, in which an individual comprehends or attempts to
! comprehend a message which is encoded graphically; and
I
j writing events, in which an individual attempts to produce
t
these graphic signs (59).
The difference between a dramatizable, externally
observable event and reflective, internal event is more
obvious in the passage I have identified as Narrative 2B.
| *
j In developing the theme that "[literacy] is tool for me to |
i understand myself" Gailee has not fully dramatized any
I
| event, but rather reported on a mental outcome of an event:
i
: when she writes, she is able to solve problems. She has not
j
drawn for her readers a picture of herself sitting at a
writing desk, pen in hand, covering blank pages with marks.
However, because there is enough here to suggest such a
scene, I have identified this as an underdramatized event
l
' rather than an undramatized one.
; Narrative 2C is of special interest because it is
! doubly self-reflexive. Gailee has written about an act of
I
j reading (a practice of her literacy skills) about the
usefulness of writing (making a list, to be precise) which
persuaded her of the usefulness of literate skills. In
order to make her point that writing is of value, she
writes about having read about the value of writing.
Narrative C provides an interesting balance to Narrative B.
One is about a reading activity which led her to appreciate
the value of writing and the other is about a writing
activity which led her to appreciate her ability to write,
! then to read what she had written as part of a
problem-solving process.
Both narratives involve solitary acts of actually using
j literacy skills in contexts and for purposes not related to
I
j any academic setting. While none of Gailee1s narratives
connect literacy acquisition to schooling, all three of
John's do. This connection is, however, very loose. In
none of the narratives does John speak of specific events
which took place within the classroom instructional
i
j situation. Both John and Gailee present themselves as
living lives as literate persons quite apart from their
roles as students in a classroom.
The third essay analyzed here was written by Bridgett,
i an "unsuccessful" student. Bridgett received a failing
118.
1
grade on a holistically-scored essay exam at the end of the
two-semester composition sequence. Her coursework for the
I
j semester received a range of marks; her narratives earned
! the higher grades and her expository essays earned the lower
grades.
Bridgett is from a black upper middle class family.
She describes her parents as "professional singing
j entertainers" and is herself preparing for a career as a
f
| dancer, saying, "If I couldn't dance I would rather do
' nothing." Explaining her reasons for being in college,
Bridgett said in another essay written for the course,
While I was in Jr. high school, my parents were already
putting the thought of going to college. All of their
children were going to complete their education. There
were no second thoughts about it. If I were going to
succeed in life I had to go to college. So I guess I'm
actually in college because of my parents.
I feel that yes literacy skills are needed in having a
! career, but how much depends on the requirements of the
job. I'm for a college education to further one's
i literacy skills, but indeed it reallly isn't needed.
Bridgett's acquisition of literacy essay more exactly
fulfills the assignment's specific requirements than does
John's or Gailee's because hers is really a narrative
I whereas their essays embed the narratives in an expository
framework. Bridgett may be better at precisely following
I
specific instructions for this assignment; however, the |
terms "successful" and "unsuccessful" are descriptive not of
their ability to follow instructions, but of the students as
j writers. That is, the better "student" (or the more
i compliant student) is not always the better writer.
Bridgett, unlike John, repeatedly presents herself as
i
| passive in the incident she dramatizes. She suggests no
purpose of her own, except when in the latter part of the
essay she mentions being "excited to meet new friends." In
the few sentences in which Bridgett represents herself as
taking any action that action always reflects compliance
j with another’s orders or is a reaction.
■ . . .my mother said 'Bridgett, put on a pretty dress
because we're going to check out a private school
today. . . So I put on my dress.
. . .before any student was admitted, they had to take
the entrance exam. So I took it.
Bridgett clearly takes very little responsibility for her
, education, as is reflected in the way she tells her story.
i
; For example:
j She told my mother that it wasn't my fault but all my
teachers that let me go without really helping my
problem.
I found myself getting deeper and deeper into trouble
and so did my teacher.
And in the very circumstances in which she might have taken j
j
j credit for her learning, working long and hard enough to
! move from the fourth grade to the fifth "after a couple of
months," Bridgett says only "Every day after school I had
to stay an hour and a half to get the extra work done. "
| ” The last of the essays I will examine here is
| Charnell's (see Appendix A, SN#20). Charnell, as a COMPlOla
I
student, did not receive letter grades on her work for the
| course. Her essays consistently were characterized by
! problems with diction and coherence. Charnell's performance
!
J on the final essay exam was the poorest of any student in
the class.
Charnell comes from a black professional class
background. In explaining the relationship between a
I
| college education and her career aspirations, she says,
t
"In my particular goal to persue a Nursing career, I
! contend that I value (rankingly)-. skill, good income,
! the care for others, benefits, status, a pleasant
I working enviroment (as far as people and physical
surrounding is concerned), and independence. I feel to
have had the ambition to persue a career and received a
degree for my years that I intimately devoted, I would
have to extol my skills and knowledge. And, I expect
I the pay to be exceptionally worthwhile, atmosphere
presentable (formerly), and excellent benefits.
Like John and Gailee, Charnell embeds her narratives
»
| within an expository framework in which she states her
i
| conviction that literacy is "essential" and "beneficial."
Remarkably different is the kind of events she chooses to
relate and her presentation of herself in these events.
i
Both of Charnell s narratives are underdramatized. In
the first, Narrative 5A, she recounts the teacher's
instructions for keeping a record of her reading much more
t particularly than she portrays her fulfillment of those
i instructions. But she leaves it to the reader to figure out
121
j the teacher's purpose in requiring the record-keeping. Her
I
| explanation that "I found reading to be an unpleasurable
I
i homework assignment. And for that simple reason, my speed
i
1 of reading and comprehensional skills resulted/displayed in
]
I tremendous improvement" is so inadequately developed and
] presumably illogical that one wonders whether this can
really be what she meant to say.3
The second narrative, 5B, is like the first in that
Charnell does not explicitly say just how the event
resulted in her acquisition of literacy skills. Another
similarity between the two is the amount of attention
I
t
| Charnell gives to literacy materials and instructions.
j
Like Bridgett, Charnell seems to take for granted that
doing certain exercises resulted in her acquisition of
I
1 literacy. Charnell does not dramatize or even mention in
I
j her narratives any awareness or consciousness of the
j utility of literacy or of herself as a literate person,
i
i
I though she repeats her description of literacy as
j "beneficial" in her conclusion-.
I
i
I
Findings and Conclusions
Differences between successful and unsuccessful
students may best be highlighted by pointing out two sets of
I comparable circumstances. Both Gailee and Bridgett have
! described situations in which their lack of literacy skills
i
put them at a disadvantage. But while Gailee makes the
122
1 experience into one in which she learns a new way to have
more control over her life, Bridgett makes her experience
into a small catastrophe from which she recovers not through
| her own efforts but as a result of a discipline to which she
was made to submit.
Even in a.narrative of an event which happened before
she was literate, while she was still quite young, Gailee
presents herself as powerful by her description of the
event. She places herself at the center of the action--she
! is the actor. For example, rather than telling that the
kindergarten teacher neglected to inform her of what the
note said, she tells her readers that she herself "attached
| no importance" to the note.
] John and Charnell have both told of their responses to
a teacher's reading program. The difference is that John
plays down the fact that the reading program was the
i
\ teacher's idea and that he had little choice in the matter.
I
Instead, he focusses on how much he enjoyed reading the
books he chose. Charnell focusses on the requirements made
of her and hardly mentions whether she actually met those
requirements.
The successful students portrayed themselves as J
self-confident and powerful. They identified the purpose 1
and interpreted meanings for the events they choose to
narrate. The unsuccessful students presented themselves as
out-of-control of the situation, passive, powerless, and
123
rvictimized. Occasionally, they seemed more like bystanders
; to or objects in rather than participants in the action they
narrated. That these two unsuccessful students happened to
both be black suggests that cultural elements of race as
I
well as racism might be factors in these differences. They
| may even be determining factors, but, as Malcolm X's
! autobiography illustrates dramatically, a sense of
powerlessness and victimization can be the motivating
| factors for achieving personal and public success as well
!
j as for failure.
| There are also striking differences in the way the
I
! successful and unsuccessful students represented the context
|
J or scene for the literacy acquisition events they chose to
| narrate. The successful students showed a preference for
I events which took place outside traditional literacy
I
; acquisition contexts such as the classroom or even
one-on-one instructional settings with a parent, or older
l
! sibling or friend. The unsuccessful students tended to
focus on classroom events or other instructional situations.
Whether the account was of success or failure in acquiring ;
t
! literacy, they represented themselves in situations where
they were students, or in some other subordinate role.4
The successful students often chose to relate events
which happened quite late in their development (as, for
example, in Gailee1s narrative of something that happened
"just day before yesterday"). The unsuccessful students
i 124:
I ........... ......._ ............................................. !
Hoften chose events which took place very early in their
j acquisition of literacy--usually kindergarten, first, and
i
second grades. This implies particular views of the nature
i
I of literacy. The better writers tend to see literacy as an
infinitely perfectible resource for accomplishing their
purposes. The poorer writers tend to isolate their
; acquisition of literacy skills at the technical, alphabetic
i
literacy level which is the focus of early training.
The better writers focus on the continuing process of
development and polishing of skills, which may account for
their tendency to narrate more than one event and to present
these events in a chronological order, reflecting increasing
i
I literacy awareness and ability. Poorer writers tend to
J present literacy acquisition as a one-time accomplishment, a
single hurdle to jump, ordeal to survive, or test to
pass--however many tries it might take.
i
] This is a very general characterization of the actor(s)
and scenes for the dramas of the acquisition of literacy.
In the section which follows I will be examining in a more
systematic way the elements of act and purpose in these
dramas.
My purpose here is to discover similarities between I
i
i
j elements in literacy acquisition events related by students.j
J
On the basis of these similarities in patterns and plots I
i
j will describe "typical" acquisition events.
I will begin then by clarifying the definition for
| literacy acquisition event I am using here:
A literacy acquisition event is any event which a
literate person identifies as having contributed to
his/her acquisition or development of literacy.
Such an event can be broken down into several elements or
events within the event. The first division is between a
skills development event and a consciousness development
event. As the macroplot identified in Chapter Three
i suggests, literacy skill and literacy consciousness or
awareness are separable, though they are interdependent.
One kind of skills development event is that during
which a literate person acquires or attempts to acquire a
|
! skill in encoding, decoding, constructing, or interpreting a
text. Adapting Chomsky's distinction between linguistic
competence and linguistic performance, I will call this
literacy competence. A literacy skills development event
i
i
; may also include any event identified as one during which a
literate person practiced, in the sense of either applying
or rehearsing (see Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The
Psychology of Literacy), literacy skills. This will be
called a literacy performance.
A literacy consciousness development event, may be
identified as one during which a literate person either
j becomes aware of himself/herself as a literate person (or
illiterate or not literate enough), or comes to an increased
awareness of either the utility or uselessness of literacy.
I 126
These events correspond to turns in the literacy
i
J acquisition macroplot's abstract schema suggested earlier.
I
skills acquisition <- awareness of utility of literacy
j (literacy competence)
| • A
V 1
skills practice - * • awareness of self as literate
(literacy performance)
Any single event narrated probably involves all four of
these turns in the macroplot, though the focal point will
j vary. . And it is possible for any one of the turns to be
the beginning point for the literacy acquisition event.
There are two sets of distinctions by which literacy
acquisition events can be categorized. The purpose of the
I
j event is the basis for my distinction between formal and
informal acquisition events.
A formal literacy acquisition event is one in which the
person in control has as his/her primary purpose
his/her own or another's acquisition of literacy.
| An informal literacy acquisition event is one in which
j the person in control does not consider his/her own or
another's acquisition of literacy the primary purpose
of the event.
The last of the distinctions involves determining
whether actual literacy practice was an element of the
acquisition event. This is a distinction between direct and
indirect acquisition.
127
j A direct literacy acquisition event is one during which
the person acquiring literacy actually practices
literacy, as either an application or rehearsal of a
literacy skill.
1 An indirect literacy acquisition event is one which has
; been identified by a literate person as being
i significant to her acquisition of literacy but during
j which she did not actually practice literacy.
i
In order to classify each of the events narrated in
the four essays according to these categories, the
I
! following schematization can be used.
t
t
I
I
128
Direct Indirect
i i !
I i i
Formal |_____________________j ___________________|
Informal_|_____________________| ___________________|
For example, Narrative IB, John's narrative about reading
spy-novels, would be classified as informal because John's
purpose for his action was not to acquire literacy, although
that was an outcome of the event. It is a direct
acquisition event because the practice of literacy, reading
the novels, was involved. The outcome of the event was
John's awareness of himself as a-literate person.
The event would then be marked in this way:
_____Direct Indirect
i
Formal
Informal
IB self-awareness I
As a further example, SN#1C, John's narrative about
flipping hams, would be marked thusly:
Direct Indirect
I I I
Formal |____________________| ____________________|
| |1C awareness of j
Informal j____________________j utility________j
The ham-flipping episode is an informal acquisition
event because acquiring literacy was not John's purpose. It
is an indirect acquisition event because no practice of
literacy was involved.
129
The table below reflects the placement of all of the
| events dramatized in these four student essays:
Direct Indirect
1 19B
j 20A
| 20B
!
skills devel
opment
'
Formal
1
| 19A
1
1
negative self
awareness
! ia
2B
2C
awareness of
utility
1C
ID
awareness of |
utility |
awareness of j
Informal |IB positive self
| awareness
2A utility |
j None of the students' narratives related literacy
I acquisition events which were formal and indirect--that is,
j having as their purpose the acquisition of literacy, but not
| involving any practice of literacy. No students described,
!
I for example, acquiring literacy skills or awareness as a
f
i
result of learning from a lecture about how to read and/or
I
write; and none related stories of being inspired through
any teacher's or parent's admonitions that they would need
to be able to read and/or write to get along in life.
The table indicates several interesting differences
I
between the narratives of successful versus unsuccessful
1 i
; students. All of the events narrated by the successful
students took place in situations in which acquisition of
130
literacy was not their main purpose. And all of the
narratives were about coming to a literacy
i consciousness--either an awareness of themselves as
i
| literate persons or an awareness of the usefulness of
i
literacy.
In contrast, narratives by unsuccessful students
dramatized formal acquisition events in primarily
school-related instructional situations. Their focus is on
development of skills competence and/or performance,
j I have approached this analysis of the attitudes,
j values, and motivations reflected in these narratives of the
j acquistion of literacy and the patterns and themes, or
"plots," which these narratives have in common with those in
I
| published autobiographies by comparing stories by successful
| students with stories by unsuccessful students. Using this
same methodology, further research on the acquisition of
literacy might explore in greater depth such aspects as the
differences in values and attitudes in narratives by
students from various non-mainstream ethnic and
socioeconomic groups; differences in the social context for
learning to read and write (school, home, job); and
differences in the cultural context (foreign vs. native,
first vs. second language).
Of interest from a developmental perspective would be
research considering whether the age of the student writer
seems to make a difference in the values and attitudes
131
; reflected in these narratives. A comparison between
narratives by men and narratives by women might also reveal
i interesting patterns. In addition, an exploration of the
role of the sibling teacher and the parent teacher could be
i
i informative. All of these variables are to some extent
I
i factors in power relationships and the individual’s sense of
| autonomy.
j This methodology might also be enhanced by
supplementing student narratives with additional information
elicited from students through other essay assignments or
questionnaires. Further, students might themselves
interview persons they identify as having had an important
influence on their acquisition of literacy. This would give
students an opportunity to be involved in original research
f of their own. In turn, the "meta-researcher” could look at
t
j the questions students asked in their interviews and thereby
find out what factors they consider to be important,
matching the students' questions of others against what they
| have told about themselves in their own narratives.
i
This is a methodology by which any teacher can come to
better understand any single student or group of students.
And for students, this self-reflexive consciousness-raising
exercise encourages examination of their own acquisition and
practices of literacy. This methodology and the study
reported here should have a special appeal for the writing
I
i
132
instructor who endeavors to integrate her teaching and
research into a recursive pedagogy.
i
I
|
i
I
I
133
Chapter Four Notes
'Krashen's comprehensible input hypothesis states that
second language learners learn to speak most efficiently
when exposed to large amounts of comprehensible input in the
the second language. He has extended this hypothesis to
include learning to write, viewing writing and reading as a
grapholect best learned through extensive reading for
pleasure.
2Anderson, Teasle, and Estrada have developed the
following definition for literacy event: "any action
sequence, involving one or more persons, in which the
production and/or comprehension of print plays a role" ("Low
Income Children’s Pre-School Literacy Experience: Some
Naturalistic Observations." The Quarterly Newsletter of the
| Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition 2.3:59).
I 3A statement Charnell made in an essay which compared
Liv Ullman's difficulty in maintaining her self-assurance
under public scrutiny with her own difficulty in projecting
j the image she wanted gives a possible clue to her sometimes
I confused syntax: "I find myself on a number of occasions (in
| public as well as class) having to put more of an effort
! into my thought and sentence structure to pose as a change
l of identity in the pursuit for a higher vocabulary and
grammar curriculum. For example, among my friends my
, vocabulary and grammar are presented in a comfortable style
I where if I were among strangers or formal associates I would
present my grammar in a sophisticated manner."
‘ ‘Thomas Kochman's Black and White Styles in Conflict
addresses the differences in classroom styles between
members of the black community and members of the white
middle class. Power relationships based on class as well as
I the usual dominant teacher and subordinate student roles may
i have been important factors in Bridgett's and Charnell's
educational experience.
j
I
I
Epilogue: Promises and Power
Two assumptions dominate literacy theory and research:
the assumption that literacy gives one power and the
i
assumption that literacy is acquired through schooling.
Considering these assumptions as myths has allowed for a
focus not on the truth or falsity of the ideas, but rather
j on their power to shape our realities because we believe
them.
In the passage from Pedagogy of the Oppressed cited in
my opening chapter, Paulo Friere spoke of "demythologizing. "
But demythologizing must not be thought of as discovering
invariable truths, rather as creating new myths. Literate
people have the capacity for creating their own new myths
because they can shape reality through that special use of
language. They have more tools and a greater repertoire for
using them to shape reality through language than do the
j illiterate.
t
The analysis in the preceding chapter tempts me to
claim that the two myths of the acquisition of literacy
contradict one another. But that would be an
: oversimplification of the the case. A more precise
statement of the relationship between the two would be to
135
j say that some literacy instructional situations bring the
i
j two myths into conflict with one another.
. I do not interpret my findings as indicating that all
students will learn literacy best during informal, indirect
acquisition events. What I have found is that accomplished
and recognized writers tend to present themselves as
powerful and autonomous when they relate incident^ in their
i
acquisition of literacy. They often choose to relate
incidents which happen outside formal instructional
situations and they often relate incidents in which literacy
acquisition was an outcome but not the directing purpose in
1 the event.
i
i
j I have surmised that because traditional literacy
I
j instructional situations rarely allow learners to assume
! dominant or autonomous roles, these situations may be
; unproductive for some students.
t
| Many of the literacy instructional situations which are
J a part of institutional literacy programs place students in
! subordinate roles. Students are promised that their
i
! acquisition of literacy will give them greater autonomy over
i
i their lives and increased power in their dealings with
others. At the same time, the literacy instructional
situation is designed so as to prohibit their exercise of '
, that autonomy and power. Not only is students’ behavior in
I !
their general activities narrowly specified in the schooling
setting, but also their very practice of their newly
I 136
! -- !
I acquired literacy is given narrow limits. The teacher is
; usually the one who decides what, how much, and when
1 students will read and write. It is probably not necessary
for me to observe here that unexercised autonomy and power
do not actually exist. An instructional situation which
forces students to be passive, powerless, submissive, will
frustrate their purpose in acquiring literacy to become
powerful.
There is also the apparent irony in the literacy
instructor's message. For who willingly gives up or gives
away or even shares her power base? It would not be
surprising if students distrusted or simply did not believe
; teachers who promised them that the acquisition of literacy
l
would bring them power. Perhaps this is the reason why the
narratives by the better writers analyzed in Chapter Four
focussed on memories of independent efforts to acquire
t literacy. And perhaps this distrust is the reason some
I
j students never seriously apply themselves to acquiring
I
literacy skills. J
On re-examining the narratives discussed in Chapter ’
}
j Four, it is difficult to determine whether there is a
I
i cause/effect relationship between perception of self as
powerful and ability to use literacy skills to accomplish
one's purpose. Were the successful students good writers
because they were assertive, self-assured persons who
i
; believed themselves to be powerful; or were they assertive
t •
137
j and self-assured because they were able to successfully use
| their literacy skills to accomplish their purposes?
I will not attempt to determine whether there is such a
cause-effect relationship or what it might be; rather I will
I
j assert that there is a correlation between self-assurance
i
about the use of literacy skills and success as a writer. I
will also emphasize the correlation between the poorer
writers' lack of success in their literacy practice and
their assumption that formal instruction was responsible for
their literate ability (or inability).
The tendency of the better writers to name informal,
indirect acquisition events implies that the traditional
writing or reading class may not be the ideal instructional
situation. But it would be irresponsible to recommend
i abandoning all attempts to teach reading and writing on the
l
strength of the stories told in these representative (
j published autobiographies and student narratives.
: Considerable further inquiry must be made, researching the
i
acquisition of literacy among writers and student
populations from other social and cultural backgrounds and,
age groups before we will begin to have a clear
i
! understanding of this aspect of literacy acquisition. j
The nine representative autobiographical narratives doj
suggest, however, that we as teachers should re-examine the
power and authority bases from which we operate in our
classrooms and tutorials. They suggest a re-examination of
I the power basis upon which we assign grades and course j
| credit as well as the authority basis from which we describe i
I
i
and prescribe adherence to text conventions.
They also suggest that literacy instruction itself
should be contextualized in the educational process so that
literacy is not seen as an end in itself but as an enhancing
and enriching force for experiencing and shaping one's
i
world. For example, increased attention might be given to
developing across-the-curriculum programs which motivate
practice and subsequent expansion of literacy skills in
contexts which have other primary purposes.
Students do not need to be told that literacy will
empower them. If their cultural conditioning has not yet
i accomplished that, our saying it won't convince them.
!
! Instead, as literacy educators we can develop writing and
I
' reading assignments and instructional practices which will
bring students to an awareness of their own identities as
literate persons. We can encourage, allow for, and elicit a
kind of writing that allows them to exercise power over
t
their lives through writing. j
I
Autobiography is this kind of writing because in the
j 1
j act of reading and writing the self through autobiography,
i
the writer fashions incoherent experience into a coherent
life story which allows her to interpret for herself what
her life means. Autobiographical writing has too often been
J carelessly classified as no more than "self-expressive"
139
writing and narrowly viewed as characteristic of only early
stages of cognitive development in a writer. I do not argue
l
\ that it is instead the highest, most complex and advanced of
i
forms. But I do suggest that it be further exploited
throughout the educational curriculum--at all stages of
development and in a variety of subject areas.
It has been my argument throughout this essay that
autobiographical narratives are an important source of
information about cultural factors in attitudes and values
toward learning to, read and write. There are two reasons
the autobiographical nature of this information is
important. First, autobiography reflects both the
j individual and her society because the writer orients her
i
! self to her cultural context in the process of fashioning a
; coherent story. This fashioning draws on the mythology of
i
' the culture from which it arises for conventions of
I
I discourse and ways of viewing reality.
I
: The second reason is that the autobiographical act is
1 itself both a literacy event and an acquisition of literacy
i event. This self-reflexive nature of the autobiographical i
! narrative of the acquisition of literacy makes it an j
especially rich source of information about both personal j
i
and cultural contexts. These self-reflexive narratives
I
I
; serve well as representative anecdotes of the events in
! learning to read and write.
It is possible that tension from the conflict between
! the two myths of the acquisition of literacy is most clearly
!
, felt not by students but by teachers. For it is possible
I
! that the better student writers have never felt compelled to
i
submit to their teacher's authority and conversely that the
unsuccessful students never had any expectations of
eventually gaining autonomy and power over their lives.
Perhaps the actual arena for the conflict is instead within
the teacher who subscribes to both myths, believing that she
1 can simultaneously exercise authority over and liberate her
I
■ students.
: I will concede that the myth of literacy for autonomy I
have identified here may be specific to Western or, even
more narrowly, Anglo-dominated mainstream culture. But I am
I
not unwilling to cause this myth to be adopted by my
students from other cultures. There is no way for me to
ever fully escape my ethnocentrism and egocentrism. Neither
is it possible for my students from other cultures to fully
J forsake their first cultures and ethnicities. At best we
I
| can cultivate in one another an awareness of the 1
i
: multiplicity of disparate realities and a delight in
!
| circumstances which cause these multiple realities to touchj
one another. '
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i Olson, Gary M. and Robert L. Mack and Susan Duffy.
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---------- . Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
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___ I
[~Rod.rigu.ez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of
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159
Appendix A
j This appendix contains the four student narratives
i
J analyzed in Chapter Four: SN#1,SN#2, SN#19, SN#20.
In the University of Southern California Freshman
Writing Program, the student's course grade is determined by
giving two-thirds weight to the TA (instructor) grade and
one-third weight to the final exam grade. These narratives
| were written by students in a COMPlOlabc and COMP107 section
l
during a semester when the program-wide final exam included
two essays. Essay 1 was a personal narrative and Essay 2
! was an argumentative or expository essay. (The narratives
; examined here are not the narratives written for the final
exam.)
i
The TA (instructor) grade was based on evaluation of
ten essays written during the course of the semester. In
those cases where the student was enrolled in COMPlOla,
which is a credit/no credit course, the coursework was not
given a letter grade. A TA grade of "N" indicates that the
i
student completed all the requirements for COMPlOla.
The exam grade was assigned after a rank ordering was
!
■ established for all examinees from all COMP101 sections in
i
that semester, using the composite of scores assigned by
160
^hree readers for each of two essays Readers of Essay 1
' used a scale of 1 to 4 to assign a holistic score. Readers
' of Essay 2 used a scale of 1 to 6.
I
! In those cases where a 101a student received an "A" for
t the exam, an "A" was assigned as her COMPlOla grade and
j COMPlOlb was thereby waived.
i
i
161
rsN#i
i
i
An evaluation of my educational and vocational careers
i
1 has shown me the necessity of literacy to my future career.
There are two particular instances in which I became aware
of literacy in the course of my school work. I also
recollect two distinct occurrences in my working life which
exemplified the importance of the ability to use literacy in
a job situation. These four experiences are the basis of my
i
1 awareness that I can achieve literacy and that it is
definitely an important attribute to help me in the job
’ market.
I
j The first real experiences that I connect with literacy
j happened in my grammar school career. I remember two
j incidents which made me aware of my ability to read. These
| happened in the fifth and seventh grade.
One evening after doing my social science homework,, I
was watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS News. I can
remember clearly Mr. Cronkite giving details of that day's
j fighting in Vietnam. "Today, north of the D.M.Z., in action
(
j to repel Viet Cong intrusions, we sustained 154 casualties
j 253 wounded and 16 missing." I became disgusted with the
i
strict numerical evaluation of the fighting which CBS
thought was sufficient to explain the day's activities. I
wanted to know why there were 154 dead, 253 wound, and 16
I
i
i
i
i 162
missing. I turned off the set and went and played
1 basketball.
As luck will have it, the next day my social science
teacher decided to increase our awareness of current events.
He assigned us all the task of researching a topic in the
newspaper and keeping clippings of that topic in a journal.
I went after the LA Times to find the meanings of the body
i
j counts from Nam and discovered not only statistics but
j detailed accounts of the fighting. This method of finding
I out information became more important to me as my quest for
explanation was filled. Previously, T.V. news had left a
void by only giving me the stats. This showed me for the
first time how the ability to read could be used for more
than just school work.
Another incident that helped me become aware of my
proficiency at reading was in the seventh grade. Upon
getting a reading assignment, which was to read 700 pages in
any combination of books, I discovered spy novels written by
Ian Fleming and John LeCarre. These novels were fascinating
to me and there didn't seem to be one moment of free time
| that I did not have the adventures of James Bond or George
l
| Smiley before me. Unable to stop reading, I easily
surpassed the assignment of 700 pages and kept reading. It
didn't seem unusual to me, as it did to ray friends, because
it was interesting, new, and even fun. At the completion of
the time allotted for the assignment, I had read 1500 pages;
163
j " easily doubling the next person on the list's total. My
j friends and peers were actually mad at me because I found
I
: the assignment so easy and enjoyable. They could not
\ comprehend the pleasure that I derived from my new hobby,
i
reading. This experience showed me that I was literate and
also good at it as well.
The two scholastic experiences showed me that I had
j literacy skills. I have had two experiences while working
I
j that have pointed out to me that I must have a job that
utilizes these skills or I wrill be uncomfortable in that
job.
While working one summer for the Cloughetty Brothers
i
I
j Packing Co., makers of Farmer John meat-products, I realized
i
1 the importance of my having a job that allows me to utilize
| my literacy skills. My job consisted of relieving an old
| Filipino gentleman, who was on vacation, in the ham
department. My duty was to stand next to a conveyer belt
\ and flip over hams as they came by me. The reason for this
j was to get both sides of the ham injected with curing juice
I before they were smoked. Ham flip Ham flip Ham flip Ham
i
j flip. The was absolutely nothing else required of me but to
! use my right arm. I didn't even have to read my
instructions! This job was demeaning to me and even though
I was well paid I felt, as Bertrand Russell describes, that
i <
I
! I was prostituting myself for the almighty dollar. This
I
! showed me that unless I wanted to do something more
|
i
( 164
' challenging than flipping hams, I had better become more
i
i literate.
i
i
| The last experience that is significant in my
determining that I need a "literate job" occurred while
working for an appliance company. While working in this job
| I was concurrently taking a class in business law. A
| situation arose that I recognized as an example case in my
I
j class. The facts were that a washing machine was delivered,
inspected, and signed for by the customer. About six hours
after the delivery had been made the customers husband
called and said the machine was damaged and that we should
replace it. My boss was upset because he was going to lose
| out monetarily if he replaced it or lose out reputation wise
!
! if he didn't. Times were hard and money seemed more
significant; so I related that as far as the law was
concerned he had no obligation to replace it because the
i
j
j customer had inspected the merchandise and signed for it. I
; showed him that example in my law book. He seemed to ignore
t
me. I reason that he did this because I was just a lowly
driver/installer and that he thought I could not possibly be
able to understand this because of the stature of my job and
my inexperience. This is a direct example of my reading
j something that was beneficial but the nature of my
!
! "illiterate job" prevented my output from being acknowledged
i
! much less considered.
165
These experiences that have related have shown how I
have determined that I need a "literate job." My first
i discovery of reading showed that it can more effectively
i
j convey information than the video medium; which our society
i
I seems so dependent on. The discovery and awareness that
reading was not only easy to me but fun as well showed that
it is a tool that I can realistically use in a job. My
experience in a demeaning job, with no literacy at all
involved, showed me that I would be uncomfortable unless I
could use my skill. And finally my experience with the "non
literate" job in which I had reasonable input but it would
! not be considered because of the stature of my job, showed
I
me that I need a job in which my ability can not only be
used but expected as well. In conclusion these experiences
' have given me insight that has allowed me added motivation
I
I to become more literate.
i
Course Grade: A; TA Grade: A
Exam Grade: A; Essay 1: 9 of 12
i Essay 2: 15 of 18
166
I
SN#2
| Most people I think would intuitively agree without
! much debate or without much inner searching for evidence
that literacy is important to them in their lives.
After a little thought I can see three examples in my
life that illustrate my continually growing appreciation and
awareness of the importance of my ability to read and write.
I discovered the power of words before I could read or
write. I do not remember having any conception that there
might be any abstract form of communication such as the
written word. I was in kindergarten. To me communication
was an oral process. One day in the coldest part of a
Seattle winter the kindergarten teacher gave us all a piece
of paper to take home. I put it in my pocket and attached
no importance to it. The next day when kindergarten was
dismissed I went to stand on the corner as always before and
wait for my father to pick me up. I waited and waited and {
waited. I was freezing. I was afraid. I was alone. And I
I
waited and waited and waited. And shivered. And cried. \
i
j And feared my parents had abandoned me. Finally my father
t
| came, bundled me home, stood me in front of the heater with '
I ’
1 i
| a blanket and some hot chocolate. My parents asked me why I
; had been standing out on the corner so long. Eventually
1 they found the note in my pocket. It said school would let
| out several hours early that day. I realized for the first
I 167
time that very important information, information that could"
save me vast discomfort and fear, could be had from marks on
j paper. Information could be passed without the giver and
, receiver ever contacting each other. I discovered that
I
! communication in writing could convey very important
t
information.
Years later, after delving into the art of reading and
writing myself, I discovered that not only did literacy give
me information about the world around me so I could avoid
I
j uncomfortable situations (like standing on a corner freezing
i
j and crying) or seek our pleasurable ones, it was a tool for
j me to understand myself. I found that when I don't
| understand something (usually emotional or interpersonal) it
' does not help me any to sit and think about it. But if I
i
: sit and write about it I think about it more clearly. And,
1 often the answer or the key to understanding just appears on
j the paper as if by magic. It seems almost as if my
| subconscious had the answer to the problem and could
I communicate it through the physical act of writing but not
I
I through consious thought. Without literacy I would not |
j posess a tool I have come to value a great deal.
! It seems that appreciating the value of literacy--the j
! ability to read and write is a never ending process. Just
j
j day before yesterday I discovered a very concrete example of
j literacy as a tool for living a successful life. Browsing
i
through a newly released book on acquiring wealth by Robert
»
j _____________ ; ____________ 168
!~Allen* I saw the results of a study on the success of
r. I graduates of an Ivy League college (Yale if I remember
j
j correctly). At graduation the students were asked about
I
their goals. Three percent had written down their goals,
many had formulated goals in their minds )in other words
oral goals) and about half had no clear goals. After
several years the graduates were resurveyed. The 3% who had
written goals were "more successful than the other 97%
combined." (I don't know what the yardstick' for "success"
\
was but since it was the same for all graduates in the study
it serves for my point.) Writing down a goal rather than
t
; keeping it in one's mind is a very simple act of literacy
i
but obviously a very powerful one. It serves as a good
j
j illustration of just how powerful a force literacy is in our
I
lives even though it is something we take for granted. I
think it is a tool whose value we underestimate.
* A multimillionaire by the time he was 35 and author of the
best seller Nothing Down on how to make money by buying
houses below market value with no down, no credit, and then
selling them at a profit.
[
1 Course Grade: A; TA Grade: A
I
Exam Grade: A; Essay 1: 7 of 12
Essay 2 : 15 of 18
169
|SNil9
| Thinking back in my past, I can still remember my days
I
;in elementary school. I remember when my parents were
jreally bringing in money from their jobs. The first things
that they did were to move the family into a better
neighborhood and also to take my brothers and sisters and I
out of public schools and into private ones. My parents had
always stress the importance of going to school to get an
education and also being able to read and write. Each of
the children either sang, dance or played an instrument.
But my parents would always say. doing all that's fine but
make sure your doing well in school.
I can remember my reportcards from my public schooling.
All my work was safifactory and my literacy skills were good
for being public schools. I can remember one day when my
mother said "Bridgett put on a pretty dress because we're
going to check out a private school today." She heard about
this school from a friend. So I put on my dress and we went
to this private school. As soon as my mother saw the
school, she was already impressed with it. We talked to the
Dean of Students and of course she thought I was a charming
little girl. She explain the school's system and also told
my mother that before any student was admitted, they had to
take the entrence exam. So' I took it. I remember that I
really didn't understand the test but I did the best I
could. After correcting my test, the dean told my mother
170
that from the looks of my exam, I could barely read and my
spelling was terrible. Of course my mother was shocked.
!
i She explain how all of my reportcards were satisfactory.
I
She told my mother that it wasn't my fault but all my
teachers that let me go without really helping my problem.
She really wanted to help, so instead of telling me no,
they enrolled me for the fall. I would be going into the
fith grade. I remember the first day of school I was so
scared, but also excited to meet new friends. Friends were
no problem, the work was. I found myself getting deeper and
deeper into trouble and so did my teacher.
I
She had a parents confrence and they all decided that
I
it would be best if I were to go back into the fourth grade
and learn all the skills that I had missed. My parents were
affraid on the effect that it was going to have on me. But
I seemed to adjust pretty well. It was a long hard process.
i
Everyday after school I had to stay an hour and a half to
get the extra work done. After a couple of months my
teacher and tutor told my parents that I could go back into
the fith grade in that same year and I wouldn't be behind,
i So instead of getting one year of school I got two years in
one. Thanks to the help of my parents and also to the
dedicated teachers who helped me become a functional human.
Course Grade: N; TA Grade: C
I Exam Grade: F; Essay 1: 6 of 12
Essay 2 : 5 of 18
171
1 SN#20
I
i
I
I
I I
| Inevitably, in todays decade of time I believe it takes
i
: more than dollars to survive "the cost of living." In fact,
| meeting the criteria to communicate effectively (in this day
! and age and the futures highly complex society) accounts for
the ultimate solution to survival. Furthermore, I consider
literacy as one of the most essential aspects of my life
which has been exceedingly beneficial. And, by acquiring
literacy skills during childhood and exercising those skills
| through adolescence has prepared me for more greater
repertoire for teachings.
First, fundamental reading and writing skills should be
developed during childhood to allow for a more gradual
learning process; specifically at the time of which all of
i
l
' my fundamental literacy skills were developed. For
I
I
instance, I have recollection of a time when my sixth grade
teacher (Ms. Leeman) constructed a daily reading exercise.
The entire class was instructed to take a sheet of paper
home of which she had designed specifically for the purpose
of keeping an accurate record of the amount of hours we read
each night, the signature of either parent that witnessed
I
I
j our readings, and the title of the book of which we read.
i
In my case, I only read a minimum of seven hours each week;
for the reason that, I found reading to be an unpleasurable
homework assignment. And for that simple reason, my speed
172
________________________________________________________________________ i
of reading and comprehensional skills resulted/displayed in
tremendous improvement,
j Equally important, there was one other memorable
^ occasion where I acquired literacy skills as a youth. For
! example, at the age of nine my mother and I had been chosen
i
to represent a new corporative business that designed games,
books, and reading materials for children. And to be
qualified my mother and I (among others) were required to
enroll in a minimal of two classes a week in an effort to
: evaluate the significance, profitting and/or usefulness of
i
j these materials. For instance, on the days of which I
j participated I was supplied with a storybook, eight track
tape, tape recorder, and a sheet of paper. Next, I was
instructed to read along with the tape (from the story book)
and later on the sheet of paper write a paragraph on the
essential points of the story. Thereafter, my mother was
i
: instructed to correct as well as discuss my work.
i
I
j To conclude, although the majority of my literacy
skills were developed through school, I found all exercises
to be very encourage and beneficial. Indeed, by acquiring
literacy skills through childhood has prepared me for more
general repertoires for further academic teachings.
I
Course grade: N,; TA grade: N
Exam grade: N; Essay 1: 3 of 12
Essay 2 : 5 of 18
173
Appendix B
These nine narratives are ordered according to the
author's relative ranking in the group of twenty students.
Thus, SN#16 was written by the student who ranked sixteenth
from the top in the group of twenty. See Appendix A for
narratives by the top two (SN#1 and SN#2) and the bottom two
(SN#19 and SN#20) students in the group.
The ranking was determined on the basis of the course
grade, the TA grade, and the exam grade. In those cases
where TA grade and exam scores were identical, the relative
ranking was determined by grades on individual essays which
were part of the coursework.
I SN#3
The unusual thing about learning a language is that the
| harder we try, the more difficult it seems. The acquisition
i
process seems an extremely unconsious one. The less
conscious a person is of trying to learn a language the
I
easier it is to learn it. Interaction with native speakers
is perhaps the most natural way to acquire a language.
Along with interaction come other forms of comprehensive
input, exposure to other facets of their culture which act
as input and help a new speaker develop a "feel" for the
language.
Children perhpas are the most fortunate receipants of
| this unconsious acquisition process. As a child in Bombay I
|
was brought up in an envoirnment where an array of different
languages where spoken. Firstly my parents, being the
products of the finest western education, spoke English
j almost all the time. English was native to them in the
j sense that they had been brought up in homes where English
was the spoken language. Their mother tongue hawever was
Urdu, the rich courtroom language of the Moghul emperors.
They did speak Urdu often enough merely to encourage us to
speak it, which we did most reluctantly.
Unlike my parents who grew up in a British dominated
India where the Queen's English was the universal language,
my childhood years were spent in a period of vast
nationalistic feeling. Indians trying hard to establish an
175
I identity separate from the 'Raaj' and the Commonwealth. The-
i country itself is extememly diverse both linguistically and
, culturally. India proudly boasts of five hundred different
Indian cultures. The only means by which people communicate
is Hindi, which under the nationalistic governments of the
sixties and seventies was elevated to the status of a
I
t
I national language. Bombay is mainly populated by peoples
from the Moharastra Region who speak a language called
Marati.
My parents spoke little Hindi or Marati and relied on
their impeccable English to carry them through professional
life in Bombay. Both were extremely well known public
I
j figures who were extemely consious and embarresed by the
| fact that they could speak neither Hindi or Marati. My
: father, like many barristers of that time, was forced to
I resort to interpreters in his cross examinations of
i
i witnesses. My mother had to hire secretaries who could read
I
j and write in both language in order to get any
correspondance done at all. They were both sadly ignorant
and extremely embarresed by the fact. Their embarresment
i
led to their insistence on me "learning" to read and write
J these language. Not really understanding the significance
I
, of these languages, I refused to do so. My Arabic lessons
(which had again been thrust upon me) were time consuming
i enough. My parents even agreed to take lessons in Hindi and
I
I
J Morati with me. I adamantly refused.
! 176
| Thanks to the public careers of my parents we were
I
| blessed enough to have a vast retinue of servants.
I
I
Interestingly enough they were from different parts of the
country and spoke a wide spectrum of different languages.
I
To my parents they spoke only English/ in a stiff formal
j manner but to us children they happily spoke in their own
j tongues. As a result expremely unconsiously we began
speaking to them in their own language. If I asked a
servant to have a saddle cleaned (in English) it took a day.
But if I asked him in his native Morati or Hindi it took a
couple of hours. I can't really say I started speaking
j these languages out of the goodness of my heart.
My shrewder instincts however served me well. In a
matter of time I was writing letters to the families of our
domestic help who were illiterate. Together with the rigid
^ | classroom schedule of writing these languages, my own
acquisition process enabled me to write these languages
easier than my classmates. I really had not realized the
j extent of my achievement until I translated for my mother
I her invitation in Murati for a cocktail party at the
i
j Governor's residence. I was then that my parents became
I
! proudly aware that I oculd speak both Hindi and Murati and
I
write them equally proficiently. They attributed my success
to my hard work and incentive and I unabashedly admitted to
I this falsehood. However unconsciously, and for whatever
t
i
| selfish reasons I had learnt both Hindi and Marati.
177
Course grade: A; TA Grade: A
Exam Grade: A; Essay 1
Essay 2
: 9 Of 12
: 16 Of 18
178
SN#4
{ ■
Reading has played a very important part in my life. I
have always been considered the "reader" of the family, as
many of my free hours are spent with a book. My reading
ability was always beyond that of my classmates, and the
more I read, the smarter I became. I believe there is a
direct correlation between how much a person reads and how
well he can convey his thoughts (or write) to others. It
was due to my avid reading that I always received good
grades in my English classes in school.
One day, when I was in the sixth grade, my parents came
to my class for a parent-teacher conference. Like most
children my age, I was afraid that the teacher would say
that I misbehaved in class, or that my grades--were not quit
up to par. However, she instead began to compliment my
parents on my reading ability, saying that I was one of the
best readers in her class. I had alwasys known that I liked
to read, but the public recognition for my reading ability
was a powerful boost to my ego, and I was determined to read
as much as I could get my hands on. For the rest of that
year, I spent all of my recess periods in the library,
reading children's novels like Charlotte's Web, Gulliver's
Travels, etc.
Seven years later, I began my sophomore year at U.S.C.
I had already studied the English language to what I
believed to be its limit. I read only when I had the time,
179
and most of the readings wee required. In order to fulfill
my language requirement, I began to select what foreign
language I would like to learn. I wanted to learn something
completely different than English. I ruled against Spanish
because I already knew a little bit, and wanted something
completely new. I chose Russian, because 1) I knew
virtually no Russian and 2) because I would have to learn
this language completely from scratch, as even the alphabet
was different.
As the weeks went by, I learned more and more Russian.
I began to go to the library at USC and UCLA and check out
books on Russian language and culture. I realised that it
didn't matter to me what language I was reading, just that I
did continue to read. I had for so long read only required
materials, that I forgot how much I liked to read for
pleasure. Now I read a book a week (approx.) and I feel
more relaxed and comfortable when I have free time, because
I know that I will have some time to read my books. I also
feel more comfortable with my writing as it improves along
with my reading ability.
Course Grade: A; TA Grade: B
Exam Grade: A Essay 1: 11 of 12
Essay 2 : 14 of 18
180
SN#6
The importance of literacy in my life began early in my
life. I entered nursery school when I was three--but my
mother had already begun to teach me to read by this time.
I was very young and being able to do this activity with my
mother meant a lot to me, both in my private life and in my
public one.
My mother has been working ever since I can remember.
We had "housekeepers" who would take care of my bother and I
during the day. My mother and I rarely shared activities
because of this. When she took the time to tach me to read
it pleased me very much. I remember reading "See Spot, see
spot run" and feeling so content when I saw the pride in my
mother's face as I made out the words. I never thought of
it as a chore, which is how I felt towards learning in
grammer school, rather--I anxiously awaited those evenings
when we read together. I felt very close to my mother
during those times.
While I am certain my mother also taught my brother to
read, I was too young to notice. My brother, at that age,
always wanted to put me in my place. His attitude was that
I was the little sister--the inferior one, so as he used
much of his knowlege, he use his ability to read as a tool
to make me feel inferior. Once my mother started teaching
me tor ead I threw this knowledge back at him, "see I can
read too, and I'm just a little kin." Because it was my
181
mother teaching me, I felt a closeness I did not realize he
also probably experienced at one time, yet still this
knowlege added to my security.
Continuing in this battle of the siblings--I recall
maybe two years later, ny brother having great difficulty
learning how to handwrite "s." I recall my parebnts
discussing notes from his teacher that he shou71d practise
his writing and study more. In my mind it seemed there was
so much emphasis on how he wrote his "s” that I was scared
to death of when I would have to learn to handwrite, would I
be able to do it? When my time came to learn how to
handwrite--I remember thinking how smart I was compared to
my brother--1 had no trouble with my "s." Again I had a
little fuel to fight the onslaught of brotherOsister
(verbal) abuse!
Being able to read and write at an early age gave me
security in my public life as well. I remember whn my
teachers started reading lessons and how happy I felt to
know so much of what she taught already. Many of the other
children looked up to me because of it. I felt important
and that was vital to me in my first experience of school
life. Once the school lessons caught up to my reading
knowledge--I remember feeling a bit frustrated, having to
learn so much for the first time with all the otyher
students. That took a bit of getting used to.
182
Learning how to read and write was an important part of
what could be considered my most impressionable year.s
These years are difficult fo all-leaving the warmth and
security of home to go to a place to learn subjects hard to
understand and be with shildren as yet jnknown. I am
grateful to my mother's efforts which made this time more of
a pleasant memory. Literacy also added to the closeness of
the family--or in my brother's cas, more equality, which
made literacy very valuable to me. Oh yes, one last
note— my brother finally learned to write his "s," maybe
that's why we are good friends now!
Course grade: N; TA Grade:
Exam Grade:
183
N;
N; Essay 1: 9 of 12
Essay 2 : 11 of 18
SN#7
Literacy is a very important part in my life. Literacy
is the basis of all jobs and of learning or acquiring new
skills.
When I was two years old, my dad and mom brought me to
the US. I couldn't speak one word of English for a whole
year. My did bought us a T.V. set and I began to watch it
all day, every day. Soon I began to repeat words from kids
show. My television really helped me acquire my ability to
understand words and pronounce them correctly.
Soon after that, my dad and I went to a book store and
bought a bunch of alphabet books and word learning books.
My dad used to sit with me, before I went to sleep, and
drill me with letters and the words that match with them.
Soom I was pronouncing "A" is for apple, "B" is for Boy ect.
After a year or two I went into Nursery School During
Nursery School I began to learn the different types of words
and how to pronounce them. Agter I graduted from
pre-school, I went on to kindergarten, where I learned how
to spell and write.
Elementary school is what really helped me get the
start on literacy. In elementary wchool I learned math,
science and grammar. After I finished elementary school, I
went into Jr. high, where I really acquired my literacy.
184
Now I was learning harder words and it was becoming easier
and easier everyday. I was getting into harder reading. We
were reading books like "A Christmas Carol/" By Charles
Dickens and other hard novels.
The text books got harder as I came to the last year of
jr. high. They were preparing me for high school. High
school is where the final touch was put on to make my
literacy complete. After high school graduation, I look
back and say to myself, if it wasn't for school I wouldn't
even be able to read the writing on my diploma.
I use my literacy a lot in my present age. In the
morning when I wake up, I run into the bathroom, and take a
shower and brush my teeth ect. In the bathroom inself you
have to use you literacy skills to read directions for
turning on the shower, for turning on the radio and even for
reading directions on my shaving cream can.
On the freeway on my way to school, I have to read a
lot of signs and understand what they mean. When I get of
of the freeway I have to read more signs that tell me not to
turn left, except on green arrow only. If I wasn't able to
read that, I would probably be dead.
In the gasoline stations where I fill up on gas, there
are signs saying no smoking Since I can read it and
understand it, it will probably save my life in the future
days. I also use my skills in my comp, class. I have to
185
read certain materials and write certain essays, like this
one.
Since I will be using my lieracy skill will the day I
die, I might as well make it better and better by going to a
university and broadening the limits of my abiliites to read
and write ect. . . .
Course Grade: N; TA Grade: N
Exam Grade: N; Essay 1: 9 of 12
Essay 2: 11 of 18
186
SN#12
Learning to read and write has taken the form of
competition in my life many times.
When I was about two and a half years old I could carry
on a conversation well enough to understand my brother and
sister. At that time they could read and write, and they
used to tell me that when they were my age they could read
and write. Naturally since I didn't want to feel inferior I
began to read and write. I learned so well thanks to my
brother and sister that when we moved to France, I was four
at that time, I "skipped a grade and went into kindergarden
rather than nursery school.
My brother my sister and I began attending a private
french school This was my chance to prove "I was no dummy."
I worked and worked to learn the new language. My learning
accellerated far beyond my peers, who were french, and
after one month at the school I was elected to represent my
class in a french recital. My brother and sister were not
going to be outdone, especially by a "little kid." They
studied and worked hard and both of them led their classes
in learning french. My sister advanced two grades and was
asked to skip two more but refused. My brother skipped a
single grade. Ah, now you're thinking I was outdone,
.no-way I worked on learning how to speak french, to the
point that when I was seven, I spoke fluent french at a
187
college level and could speak fluent american with a french
accent. In my classes up to that time the other "kids" were
jealous and an intense rivalry developed around who could
learn more and advance quicker.
I wanted to be "top dog" of the class so I put out more
than the others who were surpassing upperclassmen in their
literary skills. My first grade class averaged an
advancement of three levels of S.R.A. a week, a feat normaly
taking six weeks. Because of our competition, we strove to
learn to read and write well, as it was purely beneficial,
due to the fact that with more literacy come more status and
admiration. Thus learning to be literate developed from
competition.
When we moved back to the U.S. our literacy took a
quantum leap backward because in school the other "kids"
ostracized anyone who was advanced, and in order to "fit-in"
my brother and I did not strive for literal accomplishment,
my sister, on the other hand, did, and because of it she
took a tremendous beating mentally from her peers.
As I grew older I found being "a smart alek" to be the
way to get attention which was once derived from advanced
learning, this lasted until I was offered a "skills test" in
fourth grade. If I did well I didnot have to go to regular
class and I could take real fun classes that had all kinds
of special privileges like field trips, long recesses etc.
so once again I was inspired to learn.
188
I did, and I recieved a nearly perfect score, in fact I
had the highest score that had been produced from the
school. (I had to five myself a pat on the back Ha Ha) . And
hence began trying to out do everyone I could. This got me
into a lot of fights. I was suspended eleven times before I
reached Jr. High. Now I try to break even, and learning
that I deem essential I take seriously, to myself, and do
not like to show-off unless there is a "damn" good reason.
That is how literacy played a part in my life, good to learn
when one is very young, ostrascized if learning is done
later.
Course Grade: C; TA Grade: C
Exam Grade: B; Essay 1: 8 of 12
Essay 2: 14 of 18
189
SN#14
My Acquisition of Literacy
Literacy is a very important part of human life. The
ability to read and write well is a necessity in today's
world of high-tech and business. Therefore, it is
critically important that we learn and develop these skills
early in life. Parents and teachers should play a major
role in aiding the development of these skills throughout
the growing years of young children and teens.
My parents are both technical, professional people. My
father is a doctor and my mother a real estate agent. Due
to the nature of their occupations, they are very precise in
their speech and are avid readers. They passed that on to
me in daily practice. They encouraged me to read books,
magazines and the newpaper. When I would ask about the
spelling or meaning of a word, they would have me look it up
in a dictionary or encyclopaedia. This early training,
minor though it may have been, laid a strong foundation for
my high school and college years.
Two of the most influential people in my life, with
regards to literacy, were, not my parents but, my
high-school English teachers, Arthur Schor and May Idels.
These excellent professionals encouraged me to write in
great many ways. Through the assignments both in and out of
class, I learned how to write and tell the difference
190
between a narrative., expository, or argumentative essay.
They encouraged me to write short stories; both fictional
and excerpts from real life. They taught me how to
research, organize and properly present a rsearch/term
paper. Mr. Schor made his classes learn fifteen new
vocabulary words each week, thereby expanding our vocabulary
by at least 250 words. We learned to incorporate these
words into our writings.
The first novel I ever read was under the instruction
and supervision of Ms. Idels. She had her classes read Moby
Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and The Catcher in the Rye. She
encouraged us to continue our readings outside of class.
After finishing the novels, we would respond to them in
writing, giving examples from the readings to support our
statements. This was far beyond the book reports of
elementary school, where you simply summarize what was read.
We analyzed the readings and wrote of our findings; the
meaning, the purpose, and the style of each novel. These ;
experiences are the development of my literacy. They took
me beyond the mundane and taught me to think, question, and j
respond, both verbally and in writing to various issues and
influences in my life. They were also fantastic preparation
for college.
In my freshman year in college, my instructors for
Freshman Composition encouraged the same activity and
assigned similar tasks in order to even further develop
191
reading and writing skills. The main emphasis being to
respond to daily issues and readings in a mature,
intelligent, semi-formal matter. I was encouraged to keep
'up-to-date' with world issues as well as domestic in order
to broaden my perspective. Through these years of training,
I will emerge from college and enter the business world as a
literate, knowledgeable person who not only knows what he is
talking about, but can convey his ideas to others, both
verbally and in written form, in a way that will
intelligently and clearly inform them of my point of view.
I will be able to carry on an intellivent, mature
conversation, a critical part of being successful in future
life.
Course Grade: C; TA Grade: C;
Exam Grade: C; Essay 1: 6 of 12
Essay 2 : 13 of 18
192
SN#15
The acquisition of reading and writing began when I was five
or six years old. To be more specific, it started in a
Chinese environment. Before I went to kindergarten the
language spoken was in Chinese. At home discipline was
important and constantly emphasized. While my parents were
working my grandmother was teaching us to read and write in
Chinese. Although my skills in Chinese were not useful in
an English speaking world, my process to literacy began at
home with my grandmother.
The methods my grandmother used were similiar to the
ones useds in first or second grade but in a stricter
manner. My grandmother stressed punctuality and discipline
heavily. We got up early and sat around the table. Then my
grandmother would read to us from a first division book a
sentence. We repeated the sentence while reading, more
looking at, the character. At the same time we tried to
connect those characters to the spoken words for meaning.
This continued for 1 hour, five days a week and every week.
We then learned the "alphabets” or the pronunciation (sp?)
letters. These letters helped us pronounce the characters
on our own. We were required to rearn and recite one lesson
by heart at the end of the week.
As I had mentioned earlier, reading and writing did not
become significant until I was in kindergarten. What I had
193
"learned in Chinese I had to unlearn. For me, it was
starting over again.
The transistion from Chinese to English was difficult
and rough for me. Reading and writing in Chinese did not
help me write my telephone number or my address or the
colors espceially when no one could relate or understand it.
Yet reading and writing in Chinese taught me discipline and
methods to learn. The daily reading from the book and
repetition of writing certain number of characters helped me
approach English in a similiar way.
Looking back now, the language I learned to read and
write in was not important but way or method I used to read
and write was more significant. The constant practice and
the amount of time faithfully put in taught me how to master
a language in written form.
Course Grade: C; TA Grade: C
Exam Grade: C; Essay 1: 8 of 12
Essay 2 : 10 of 18
194
SN#16
I became literate the way most people in the United
State do, through school. School taught me how to read and
write so I could survive in the society. School taught the
principals of reading and writing so I can achieve what I
wanted.
I first realized how important it was to be able to
read and write when I was in the third grade. I was one of
five Japanese American students in the class. I felt out of
place with them in the classroom because they were expremely
smart. I was not able to compete on the same academic level
as them. The other four Japanese would be able to finish
assignments in half the time due to their knowledge of the
subject. They all were excellent readers for the third
grade, I was jealous that I could not read as well as they
did. The teacher said that they read much more out of class
than I did, so they should be better readers and writers. I
thought that they were naturally smart, but I was wrong.
They used to go home and read after school while I would go
out and play. One day I had to do an oral book report with
the teacher. I read the book but I did not know what it was
about. I could not answer the questions the teacher was
asking, she asked me if I read the book seriously and I said
I did. After I failed the book report she asid that I
should read for understanding and not just to say that I
195
read the book. There is more to reading a book than just
reading the words. I took the advice and started reading
more carefullly and trying to understand what the author is
attempting to convey to his readers. I began to understand
what books were about and enjoyed reading more. I began to
read more and more books, expanding my knowledge on subjects
I was interested in. The advice the teacher gave changed my
whole outlook on reading. I am thankful.
School also taught me to be literate in a foreign
language. I took Spanish in High school for two semesters.
My teacher was of Spanish decent so he knew the language
well, and could tell the class stories about Mexico. The
class taught me to read and write Spanish. I became very
proliferate in the language. Being able to read and write
made my vacation in Mexico much more enjoyable. Going to a
foreign country and not knowing the language can be
extremely scary. By knowing Spanish, I was able to
communicate with people such as taxi drivers and waiters.
Being able to read the newspaper filled me in on what was
going on that particular day. By being able to read and
write the langauge I spoke it also. Speaking the language
is much more of an advantage in a foreign country. For
example I was able to talk to vendors selling goods trying
to make them to lower their prices. I was successful
because I spoke the language.
196
Reading and writing are an attribute to any person.
Course Grade: C; TA Grade: C;
Exam Grade: C; Essay 1: 7 of 12
Essay 2 : 10 of 18
197
SN#18
To become a literate person, you acquire it through
socialization. By this I mean, the organization of my
family and my school working together to help me become a
literate person, learning to read and write.
Looking back to when I first started school
(kindergarten) I didn't know what to expect only that I was
there to learn my a.b.c"s, and read. It was terrible
because I was so scared. I never said anything, but when we
had to read as a class, I would sit and stare at the book,
not saying a word, I knew what it said, but I was so afraid
to speak, until the teacher came up behind me and pulled on
my ponytail, making my eyes water, I finally read aloud
hating her making read. Writing, that was my favorite,
learning to write the letters in between the lines. I
always enjoyed doing the writing part. I would always try
to write the letter(s) in a different style, but the teacher
didn't like that, so I just stayed with what I saw and
copied (wrote) it down the way it was suppose to be.
After my bad experience with reading a book, I decided
to show her that I could read by taking books home and
reading them to my sister. My sister told me that, I read
pretty good, that really made me happy. After I would
finish my books that I took home, I would take some more
198
home and read and reach I continued this through sixth
grade. I enjoyed reading all the books. With the help of
my family and going to school I became a literate a person,
not even knowing it then. I thought I was just going to
school to prepare myself for college. I guess I took it for
granted that everyone else including myself could read and
write. But I found that to be false. Even though I see
people graduating from high school some still can't read or
write. It's really sad to see someone who can't read or
write. I think to survive in the "real world" you have to
be able to read and write. Looking for jobs, you have to
read the classified ads to see what job openings there are,
and then when you get there you would probably have to fill
out an application which would require you to write. I know
a friend who went to apply for a job, he couldn't even read
the job application--he didn't know what to do. I thought
that was so sad--at first I thought it was funny because I
couldn't believe anyone not knowing how to fill out an
application because I just assumed everyone knew how. But
then I looked at his background, where he lived, what kind
of education he was getting compared to mine. You see, I
was taught to learn how to look for a job, type a resume,
fill out an application, and go on an interview. And where
my friend went to school, he was not taught any of these
things and his mother didn't really help him at all about
how to look for a job and what to do when you got there. So
199
now he is going to a special class to learn how to read.
Here he is a high school graduate and he can't read a simple
job application. That's sad. It's so important, at least
to me that a person has to know how to read and write. For
me, it stimulates my mind, knowing that I have a brain up
there and using it. That's why I feel reading and writing
is so important without that skill, I would feel REAL
stupid! As I said before, everyone has to be a literate
person in order to survive in the real world. Without it I
would feel alienated from everyone, I would be at the very
bottom (low-class) . I'd be embarassed to show my face in
front of people who were literates. Besides being
embarrassed I would feel that I was missing something,
that's why it's so important to me--I want to feel that I
can read and I can write!
Course Grade: C; TA grade:
Exam grade:
200
C
D; Essay 1: 6 of 12
Essay 2 : 8 of 18

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