Literacy and Orality

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.

David R. Olson (Edited by), Nancy Torrance (Edited by)

9780521392174, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 July 1991

304 pages, 1 b/w illus. 1 table
23.8 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.558 kg

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.

Preface
Introduction David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance
Part I. Oral And Literate Aspects Of Culture And Cognition: 1. The oral-literature equation: a formula for the modern mind Eric Havelock
2. A plea for research on lay literary Ivan Illich
3. Oral metalanguage Carol Fleisher Feldman
4. Rational thought in oral culture and literate decontextualization J. Peter Denny
5. Cree literacy in the syllabic script Jo Anne Bennett and John W. Berry
6. Literacy: an instrument of Oppression D. P. Pattanayak
Part II. Oral And Literate Forms Of Discourse: 7. Lie it as it plays: Chaucer becomes an author Barry Sanders
8. The invention of self: autobiography and its forms Jerome Bruner and Susan Weisser
9. Literacy and objectivity: the rise of modern science David R. Olson
10. Thinking through literacies Jeffrey Kittay
Part III. Oral And Literate Aspects Of Cognition: 11. Literacy: its characterization and implications R. Narasimhan
12. The separation of words and the physiology of reading Paul Saenger
13. Linguists, literacy, and the intersionality of Marshall McLuhan's Western man Robert J. Scholes and Brenda J. Willis
14. A neurological point of view on social alexia André Roch Lecours and Maria Alice Parente
15. Literacy as metalinguistic activity David R. Olson
Author index
Subject index.

Subject Areas: Educational psychology [JNC]