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There constantly seems to be an underlying theme of a loss of reality or perhaps a moving reality. This loss of reality centralizes around Stevens constant transfer between the reality of a situation and what a butler must do or what is the important to him at that moment. Stevens recollects an event or time in Lord Darlington’s house and while there are some controversial, philosophical, or humanitarian debate taking place, the reader is suddenly thrown into a conversation about polishing silver, or a butler who shoots a tiger in the dinning room. This sudden shift takes the reader away from the ideologies of social order to maintaining of house. This serves as a reminder that Stevens concerns appear to surround the constant needs of Lord Darlington and his house rather then the humanitarian, or so thought humanitarian, efforts of this council. Which this also leads to his desire to be a great butler, he explains that he desire to be a great butler is dependent partly upon the gentlemen in which he serves. Therefore, the man he serves must be a great gentlemen and in his generation one that works for a gentlemen that seeks the betterment of mankind. However, while he believes Lord Darlington is attempting to aid mankind he seems to take no interest in what he is attempting to do aid mankind.

However, that said there are characters who are in essence sprinkled in. Characters like Congressman Lewis, Miss Kenton and some of the characters that Stevens encounters along his journey because they are a touch of reality. They bring into this idealistic would that Stevens and Lord Darlington live in a sense of the real world. The human emotions and concerns that are part of the pursuit of the betterment of mankind are in some form or another kept neat an tidy by the conference of the world leaders but they never go and experience it with society. However, these characters that are sprinkled in have interacted with the society in which whom this idealistic society is attempting to change and help.

This week my mind was refocused into a series of symbols. This was the beginning of a thought that was iterated into a string of sounds that were interpreted by others as language. The words on the page that I am currently typing are commonly known symbols of a phonetic alphabet that has been adapted (and adopted) over several centuries. When discussing language and literacy in a historical context, my mind immediately jumps to the Old Testament of the Bible and the implications of the variations it has stemmed through the ages.

In Jack Goody and Ian Watt’s “The Consequences of Literacy” the authors explain that the adaptation of writing within a culture can take several generations to formulate. For example Hebrew took six centuries to adopt Semitic writing as a recognized text that was published and available for all to study through the Torah.

What surprises me the most about this claim is the idea that the authors describe the Hebrew (phonetic) alphabet as a “democratic” script. There is a culturing and choosing of sounds that will be represented within the alphabet (around 40 sounds). According to Goody and Watt the alphabet is a socially-conventionalized pattern, and it is through “symbolizing in letters these selected phonemic units the alphabet makes it possible to write easily and read unambiguously about anything which the society can talk about” (316).

This means that for six centuries there was a negotiated arrangement of sounds and symbols before the culture was considered by historians to be “literate”.

The years of adaptation and variance of Biblical context could be as simple as calling into question the amount of sheep or goats used in an offering, or it could be as relevant and all encompassing as shifting and negotiating the meaning of the word “day”, “time”, or “age”.

My questions of this article as it reflects upon other historical text are mainly focused on the social implications of changing language.

Do we as a culture have negotiated meanings that could have serious ramifications in the future? Does contextual evidence always give historians/anthropologist the whole story, and what do we assume as a society if we all agree upon these contextual relationships?

The Goody & Watt article was a beast! It spanned the history of our oral and written literacy through their own understanding as to the events that shaped our society based on literacy practices and didn’t seem to skip a moment.

For my own research, the shift from oral to written Myths became significant because I am currently looking at the way Euripides takes the oral and written Myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece and adapts the story in his attempt “to wrestle with the problems with which the changes in the cultural tradition had faced them” (323). I had been looking for ways to describe this shift and how or why the story and its genre as a play and adaptation function, and this article can help me make more sense of that, as well as the continued debates around literacy that focus on these same issues.

And this did continue in the Collins and Blott article, which pointed out that the argument between oral Myth and written is not so much about literacy but about genre. When I read that, it made perfect sense. If we think about the affordances of genre, or the way we tell a story, it really plays into the factors as to what should be included and what left out. As well, the period with which these stories are told, whether orally or written, changes the genre with which the author chooses to write his or her piece in.
For example, if we look at Euripides’ play “Medea”, which continues the original Myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, we find that the play takes the focus off our hero/anti-hero, Jason, and centers it on the wife, the woman, Medea. This choice to put it into a play is derivative of the times and the calling for such writing and entertainment. The choice to focus on Medea as the main character and the things she faces and overcomes as a woman is done to address societal concerns around gender.

If we take this simple analysis of the story and shift to modern times, a play may never get the same message across. Now, we may use something like a Super Bowl commercial that highlights a concern with a hashtag. The #likeagirl campaign from yesterday comes to mind. Or the mass amounts of Father/Daughter and Father/Son commercials. Again, the point here is that genre is a key component to the understanding of why or how affective a story or message is.

Now that I’ve strayed far enough away from the article to have you wondering where the hell I’m going with all this, I leave you so I may research more around this idea of genre and adaptation before the spark is gone.

First, I would just like to point out how appropriate the title of Chapter 2 is: “The Literacy Thesis: Vexed Questions of Rationality, Development, and Self.” Special emphasis on vexed. Collins and Blot really knew what they were doing because I felt pretty vexed while reading.

But let’s back up…as some of my peers are aware, I am a notorious mindmapper. As a visual learner, mindmaps help me make sense of what I read as well as helping me make connections. Also, purple pens. Enough said.

Now today’s mindmap looks a bit messy. There’s no real flow to the thing, just a ton of words and arrows. In retrospect, I’m having trouble articulating how on earth this is helpful…I suppose I’ll start at the top.

The Great Divide = Literates vs. Nonliterates. In the Post-WWII period, literacy became tied to stages of civilization, grammatical elaboration or racial order (10). Literate became synonymous with qualities like morality, economic prospects and civic virtue while nonliterate was tied to criminality, poverty, and political apathy. According to Goody and Watt (1963), the two key elements of a literate mentality are: 1) capability of thinking historically and 2) capability from distinguishing truth from opinion (23).

The problem I have with these connections is due (in part) to my own inability to 1) think historically. In my mind, I read the words “literate” and “nonliterate” and immediately replace them with “educated” and “uneducated” because most of the modern United States is literate but many do not achieve higher than a high school education. Even today, 7% of high school students drop out without receiving a diploma. Despite this inability to think historically, I am both literate and educated. In terms of 2) “distinguishing truth from opinion,” I run in to another problem: everything in this chapter is opinion but it reads more like truth. The “facts” are published by respected ethnographers and scholars and we are taught in primary and secondary school to trust text written by researchers, despite the fact that there is room for error in interpreting research. Collins and Blot call this a “literate bias,” which is part of our academic common sense (17). If it is peer reviewed and published by an author with the prefix “Dr,” we are expected to trust it. So what is the truth and how do I, as a literate and educated woman, separate it from all the opinions outlined in this chapter?

In the same period when literacy was synonymous with morality, literacy was also intimately connected to writing. Writing was the essential feature that distinguishes civilizations from simpler human societies (10). Writing was also the necessary ingredient for transforming simple, native languages into modern languages. Collins and Blot make it very clear that (according to scholars in the Post-WWII era) oral native languages had no place in the contemporary world. “Oral” became synonymous with “myth” while “written” became synonymous with “history.” And even when previously oral languages create a written component to their native language (Tolowa Language Committee in Northern California, for example), the politics of tribal recognition and academic authority stonewall the attempts at making that oral language legitimate to the modern world.

So now I’m really frustrated. We expect people to read and write or else they’re criminals. We also expect all languages to have a written component or else it is not worth learning. We also expect writing to be historically accurate and therefore truthful because writing has the power to coordinate social action on an unprecedented scale (17). We expect all of this out of reading and writing and we expect so little from talking. My confusion here is the reason for separation between “speaking” and “writing” and Collins and Blot made me wait all the way till the end of the chapter before they got to deCereau (1984) who said that writing and orality are actually complementary modes of expression. THANK YOU. Because I was really confused about why oral traditions have been viewed as unimportant. Because we cannot confirm stories as easily? Because memory changes a story every time you tell it? Last time I checked, history (remember “history” = “written” = “truthful”) is written by the victors and the versions of histories that end up in high school textbooks are rarely “truthful.”