Revisiting Jack Goody to Rethink Determinisms in Literacy Studies

Abstract

This article revisits Goody's arguments about literacy's influence on social arrangements, culture, cognition, economics, and other domains of existence. Whereas some of his arguments tend toward technological determinism (i.e., literacy causes change in the world), other of his arguments construe literacy as a force that shapes and is shaped by disparate social processes. This article also reviews the critiques of Goody's work developed in the subfield of sociocultural literacy studies. Although the critics are right to object to the elements of technological determinism in his work, their rejection of his larger project leads them to miss ideas that can help clarify literacy's role in the transformation of society. Moreover, their misreading of Goody's work contributes to the field's underestimation of the distinct force of literacy and overestimation of the force of local cultures. In other words, how they misread Goody's work limits the depth of the answers that they provide to questions about literacy and its relations to culture, economics, politics, and other social spheres. These relations can be better understood when Goody's work is reread with an interaction model of literacy that figures changes in literacy as conditions of and conditional upon changes in other domains. Equipped with this model, researchers may rectify the supposed technological determinism of Goody's approach and the cultural determinism of some sociocultural accounts of literacy. Researchers may then synthesize these ideas to develop approaches that clarify literacy's evolving relations with other aspects of the world. This article concludes by explaining how a revised understanding of genre may bring into view the interplay between literacy and different social processes.

How Rhetorical Theories of Genre Address Common Core Writing Standards

“…Over the past thirty years, rhetoricians have reconceived genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller, ; see also Bawarshi, ; Collin, , ; Devitt, ; Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, ; Russell, ). Following Burke (), rhetoricians often define situation as a complex of five interconnected dimensions: scene, acts, agents, agency, and purposes (see Fig.…”

Ideology and Interaction: Debating Determinisms in Literacy Studies

“…In a recent Reading Research Quarterly article, Collin ( 2013 ) reexamines the work of Jack Goody to reconsider some of "the consequences of literacy" (Goody, 1968(Goody, , 1977(Goody, , 1986Goody & Watt, 1963 ). Besides clarifying Goody ' s arguments, Collin seeks to reconstruct from Goody ' s work concepts that can reveal literacy ' s interactions with social, cultural, political, and economic processes.…”

“…In his critique of the “cultural determinism” of literacy studies, Collin () argues that processes in the “sphere of technology” may themselves have social effects. Discussing the literacy practices involved in the crisis in credit markets, for instance, Collin writes, “technology, which encompasses different modes of reading and writing,” may, in the form of digital communications, stand as a “condition of the current economic crisis” (p. 34).…”

“…Moreover, I argue that the kinds of innovations that Collin seems to be proposing in literacy theory—innovations that background the socioideological in favor of the technological—narrow our understandings of literacy. In “Revisiting Jack Goody to Rethink Determinisms in Literacy Studies,” Collin () mobilizes Althusser's theory of overdetermination to reassert a technological moment in literacy. I will leave him to develop this argument further.…”

“…I welcome the opportunity to respond to Street's critique of my interaction model of literacy (Collin, ). His work on the ideological dimensions of literacy helped me think through literacy's interacting components, so an exchange of this kind allows me both to clarify the interaction model and to distinguish it from other models of literacy.…”