Narratives of Literacy: Connecting Composition to Culture

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College Composition and Communication. Narratives of Literacy:Connecting Composition to Culture n 1986 Lester Faigley analyzed three competing theories of the writing process: the expressive, the cognitive, and the social. Although calling for a synthesis, Faigley was clearly endorsing the social view. He identified four strands of research which contributed to the social perspective he was advocating: post-structuralist theories of language, sociology of science, ethnographies of literacy and language, and Marxism. Two o these four-ethnography and Marxism-contributed texts about literacy that were instrumental in helping composition studies make what has bee called the social turn (Trimbur, "Taking"; Bizzell, Academic 202). Indeed the move in composition studies away from the individualistic and cognitive perspectives of the seventies and early eighties toward the social theories and political consciousness that prevail today was encouraged, pushed along, impelled by competing narratives of literacy. These days, literacythe term and concept-connects composition, with its emphasis on students and classrooms, to the social, political, economic, historical, and cultural.In thinking about the relations of literacy and composition, I have found helpful Jean-Francois Lyotard's notions of the grand narratives of modernism and the little narratives of postmodernism. Lyotard argues in The Postmodern Condition that in the modern age knowledge is justified, or legitimated, through narrative. The legitimacy of an idea, a work, or a proposal depends, in other words, on its contribution to one of two grand narratives. As Lyotard puts it, "The mode of legitimation.. .which reintroduces narrative as the validity of knowledge, can thus take two routes, depending on whether it represents the subject of the narrative as cognitive Beth Daniell is an associate professor of English and former Director of Composition and Rhetoric at Clemson University in South Carolina. She has been reading and writing about literacy theory and research since her first graduate seminar with Lester Faigley at the University of Texas, many (many) years ago. She is currently working on a book about how a group of women use literacy in the their spiritual lives. CCC 50.3/February 1999 393This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sat, 3 Jan 2015 23:18:39 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 394 CCC 50/February 1999 or practical, as a hero of knowledge or a hero of liberty" (31). Subjected to the skepticism of the postmodern age, these "totalizing" metanarratives, according to Lyotard, have been d...

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