Literacy and Orality

by Edited by David R. Olson , Nancy Torrance

• ISBN13: 9780521392174
• ISBN10: 0521392179
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1991-07-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The debate on the social and psychological implications of literacy enters a new stage with the publication of this volume. Distinguished scholars provide a sustained and detailed examination of the relations between orality and literacy, the traditions based on them, the functions served by them, and the psychological and linguistic processes recruited and enhanced by them. By shedding the romantic view that literacy is the royal road to rationality and modernity, the volume provides a more functional view of literacy. It places a new emphasis on the relationship between speaking and writing, and highlights the different ways in which people exploit the particular resources of speech and writing for special purposes such as building community, creating records, specialising genres such as prose fiction, enhancing private study and meditation, and enhancing the specialisation and organisation of knowledge.

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix
Preface	xi
Introduction	1	(10)
David R. Olson
Nancy Torrance
Part I Oral and literate aspects of culture and cognition
The oral-literature equation: a formula for the modern mind	11	(17)
Eric Havelock
A plea for research on lay literacy	28	(19)
Ivan illich
Oral metalanguage	47	(19)
Carol Fleischer Feldman
Rational thought in oral culture and literate decontextualization	66	(24)
J. Peter Denny
Cree literacy in the syllabic script	90	(15)
Jo Anne Bennett
John W. Berry
Literacy: an instrument of oppression	105	(6)
D. P. Pattanayak
Part II Oral and literate forms of discourse
Lie it as it plays: Chaucer becomes an author	111	(18)
Barry Sanders
The invention of self: autobiography and its forms	129	(20)
Jerome Bruner
Susan Weisser
Literacy and Objectivity: the rise of modern science	149	(16)
David R. Olson
Thinking through literacies	165	(12)
Jeffrey Kittay
Part III Oral and literate aspects of cognition
Literacy: its characterization and implications	177	(21)
R. Narasimhan
The separation of words and the physiology of reading	198	(17)
Paul Saenger
Linguists, literacy, and the intensionality of Marshall McLuchan's Western man	215	(21)
Robert J. Scholes
Brenda J. Willis
A neurological point of view on social alexia	236	(15)
Andre Roch Lecours
Maria Alice Parente
Literacy as metalinguistic activity	251	(20)
David R. Olson
Author index	271	(5)
Subject index	276