Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Faigley, "Literacy after the Revolution"

Faigley, Lester. "Literacy after the Revolution." CCC 48.1 (1997): 30-43.

In this CCCC chair's address from 1996, Lester Faigley speaks to the moment of the mid-1990's as a stark contrast to the moments (involving social conditions) of the 1960s and 70s that gave rise to composition studies.  Sizing up composition against the historical moment in which it was more "favored," Faigley points out the discipline's changing status. More to the point, Faigley is concerned with two counterpart revolutions: a revolution of the rich and a digital revolution. Both revolutions are interlaced, and they have major implications for composition studies.  The first concerns a changing political economy and related issues of a redistribution of wealth, layoffs, economic depression, trends toward a global economy (300-301), downsizing, and trust on the "invisible hand of the unregulated market" (302). 

With the second revolution, Faigley's talk becomes anticipatory, predicting the coming of the Internet as a force to have a major impact on higher education.  He names the "new literacy" of digital communications technologies, and notes that students often already know these technologies well beyond the scope of our limited encounters with them in our composition curricula (he gives a nod to the curriculum at Texas): "I do not foresee colleges and universities remaining unaffected by these developments for long" (306).  Faigley also says we should reserve judgment about the Internet being good or bad, and we should recognize the overlap of online communications and "significant public issues" (303). He is especially concerned about the Internet's role in social movements (307), and he builds toward the realities of limited access (307).

Throughout, Faigley invokes metaphors related to water: wave, rip tide, "swimming against the current" (302), tides. Given the new literacies involved with technological change, he mentions the possible decline of the essay (308). The outlook for composition is favorable, Faigley says, because "we are not tied to narrow disciplinary turf" (309), "we can cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries" (309), and "the need for what we teach will only increase" (309).  But he follows with a set of concerns in these three questions:

• Can we do anything to stop the decline in publicly supported education?
• Can we promote a literacy that challenges monopolies of knowledge and information?
• Can we use technology to lessen rather than widen social divisions?

To end the address, he invokes Berlin's Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures and also echoes the network concepts in Lloyd-Jones by reiterating the importance of working together as opposed to working along.

"Most disappointing, the discipline's success has not influenced institutions to improve the working conditions of many teachers of writing" (300).

"I'm going to talk today about how larger forces of change affect how we see ourselves and what we do. These changes are of such a magnitude that they have been labeled revolutions--one a technological transformation called the digital revolution and the other an economic, social, and political transformation called the revolution of the rich." (300).

"Today no one is calling for taxes to ameliorate poverty on money earned by speculation. Instead government is identified with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and waste" (301).

"The revolution of the rich has been facilitated by another related revolution--the digital revolution of electronic communications technologies" (302).

"But as personal computers become enormously powerful in memory and speed, they began to challenge the unproblematic relationship between familiar pedagogy and new technology" (303).

"The ingenious solution was to flatten communications hierarchy, making every node equivalent so that the loss of any one node would not collapse the system" (304).

"We as teachers have little control over who gains access to higher education and even less control over who gains access to the Internet" (307).

Related sources:

Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures. Urbana: NCTE, 1996.

Birkets, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Hairston, Maxine C. "Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections." CCC 36 (1985): 272-82.

Posted by Derek Mueller at September 12, 2006 12:49 PM to Writing Technologies