Imagining Literacy: Rhizomes of Knowledge in American Culture and Literature

by Ramona Fernandez

Overview

Defining the "common knowledge" a "literate" person should possess has provoked intense debate ever since the publication of E. D. Hirsch’s controversial book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Yet the basic concept of "common knowledge," Ramona Fernandez argues, is a Eurocentric model ill-suited to a society composed of many distinct cultures and many local knowledges. In this book, Fernandez decodes the ideological assumptions that underlie prevailing models of cultural literacy as she offers new ways of imagining and modeling mixed cultural and non-print literacies. In particular, she challenges the biases inherent in the "encyclopedias" of knowledge promulgated by E. D. Hirsch and others, by Disney World’s EPCOT Center, and by the Smithsonian Institution. In contrast to these, she places the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Leslie Marmon Silko, whose works model a cultural literacy that weaves connections across many local knowledges and many ways of knowing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292782037
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	01/01/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	535 KB

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction. To Read or Not
Chapter 1. The Semiosis of Literacy
Chapter 2. Whose Encyclopedia?
Chapter 3. Reading Trickster Writing
Chapter 4. Disney's Labyrinth: EPCOT, Capital of the Twenty-first Century
Chapter 5. The Smithsonian's Encyclopedia: Museum as Canon
Conclusion. Imagining Literacy in a Mixed Culture
Notes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

Alicia Gaspar de Alba

There are many wonderful things about this book... all of which indicate a scholar at the cutting-edge of her field.... Indeed, Fernandez's analysis of the ideological trappings of literacy is truly first-rate and illuminating on many counts, especially for those of us concerned with the uses and implications of multiculturalism and its consequent backlash across the curriculum.
—(Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Los Angeles )