From Literature to Cultural Literacy

Abstract

In recent years, the academic field of literary studies has changed radically. Literary scholars are now working on objects other than poems, dramas or fiction. This essay presents an ongoing strategic project, Cultural Literacy in Contemporary Europe, which was founded in 2007 and run in 2009-11 as an European Science Foundation & Cooperation in Science and Technology (ESF-COST) synergy. Its aim is to investigate and celebrate the range of research currently being conducted in the field we have renamed “literary-and-cultural studies”, or LCS. This research aims to enhance cultural literacy. Cultural literacy is an attitude to the social and cultural phenomena that shape our existence—bodies of knowledge, fields of social action, individuals or groups, and of course cultural artefacts, including texts—which views them as being essentially readable: it is a way of looking at social and cultural issues, especially issues of change and mobility, through the lens of literary thinking. The project focuses on four academic fields—cultural memory, migration and translation, electronic textuality, and biopolitics and the body—and four concepts: textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity and historicity. It stresses multilingualism and is part of the movement of interdisciplinarity within the humanities and between the humanities and other disciplines, but remains a distinctive activity within that larger movement.

Values of Character Education in the Sirih Pinang Symbol: A Cultural Value of Coastal Society

“…Figure 1. Componentsof data analysis: interactive model (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014)  RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Sirih pinang can be seen from what appears and what is behind the look, in analyzing a cultural phenomenon saw it in text and context, cultural literacy is a gesture of social and cultural phenomena that make up our existence of knowledge group, social action field, individual or group, and of course cultural artifacts, including texts that view it as something that can be essentially readable (Segal, 2015).…”

Learning Cultural Literacy through Creative Practices in Schools

“…Literacy as a concept has extended from normative expectations about reading and writing texts to the idea of social practice and capacity for cultural communication and encountering differences (Arizpe et al 2014;Maine and Vrikki 2021). Instead of emphasizing cultural or historical canons as a key for cultural literacy, as Hirsch (1988Hirsch ( , 1989 does, or understanding it as a literary theorybased approach to cultural and social phenomena, as Segal (2014Segal ( , 2015 has defined it, we see cultural literacy as an ability to encounter, communicate, learn, cocreate knowledge, and to live together through empathic, tolerant, and inclusive interaction with others who may be different from ourselves. In our view, cultural literacy learning can be stimulated by concrete creative practices, such as joint cultural or artistic tasks.…”

Social Responsibility Through the Lens of an Agenda for Cultural Literacy Learning: Analyses of National Education Policy Documentation

“…1 The concept of cultural literacy has been transformed partly using Freire's (2017) ideas towards critical and dialogic thinking, existential perception of action and events, and growth of reflection by turning attention to social responsibility. Presenting the ideas and purposes of the CLE, Segal (2015) stresses contemporary contexts of cultures that face migration, biopolitics, biosociality and unequal body treatment in different societies, and growth of new types of problems, which is why it is important to foster human rights and social responsibility. Education for social responsibility started being perceived neither as a way to ensure higher professional prestige among companies, as it was around the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Crave et al 2014), nor as a way to increase power, which was treated as foundation given the development of Corporate Social Responsibility in 1960 (Davis 1960).…”