1. a theory of reading or writing

8/2/2019 1. a Theory of Reading or Writing

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Correspondence:David R. Olson, OISE,

University of Toronto,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

E-mail:

[email protected]

51Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009. The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press.For Permissions, please email: [email protected]:10.1093/wsr/wsp005

A theory of reading/writing: fromliteracy to literature

David R. Olson

OISE, University of Toronto

AbstractThis article traces some aspects of the history of Western literacy in terms of the

invention of three discrete forms or genres of writing and reading, namely: logical

prose, empirical description, and subjective narrative fiction. It then attempts to

explain these developments in terms of the special properties of language brought

into consciousness when, through writing, expressions become permanent objects

fixed in time and space and distanced conceptually from their speakers/authors

intentions.

Literacy has remained at the top of the political

agenda of developed and developing nations for over

a century. Reflecting this priority, research and the-

ory devoted to understanding and promoting literacy

have become the focus of a number of disciplines

and an increasing number of sub-disciplines. While

this specialization has resulted in more rigorous and

detailed research, it has encouraged the suspicion

that there is nothing general to be said about the

diverse world of literacy. This article is an attempt

to provide a more general theory that would link atleast some of these lines of research and theory in

terms of a theory of reading/writing.

Some attempts at, if not integration, at least coop-

eration, amongst these various lines of research and

theory appear in the interdisciplinary handbooks that

have appeared recently (Wagneret al., 1999; Kamil

et al., 2000; Nunes and Bryant, 2004; Bazerman,

2008; Olson and Torrance, 2009). One effect has been

that the study of literacy has moved from the exclu-

sive study of the basic skills of reading and writing

to include the study of literature as a formative fac-tor in the shaping of the modern world and modern

forms of rationality. Traditional distinctions between

reading as decoding visible marks into spoken

forms, comprehension as assigning a meaning

to a written form, and interpretation as construal

of a text for a particular purpose within a certain

interpretive or textual tradition have been pulled

together into a generic notion of literacy, or, more

colloquially, of reading. A side benefit would be the

collapse of the great reading debate waged between

those who identify reading with decoding and those

who identify reading with understanding and interpre-

tation. The implications of literacy, consequently, are

to be sought not only in the mastery of the properties

of the script but also equally importantly in master-

ing the ways that scripts are employed in the creation

of the diverse forms of extended texts we think of asliterature and the ways that those texts are written and

read. Ways of reading/writing, on this view, provide

a promising route to a new understanding of forms

of discourse, i.e. genres, and their implied ways of

thinking, i.e. forms of rationality.

1 Speech and Writing

The classification of visual displays used for purposes

of representation and communication commonlydistinguishes iconic depictions, signs that resemble

the objects and events they represent, from symbols,

signs that represent by convention (Morris, 1938).

Among the latter, only signs capable of representing

utterances are classed as writing systems (Daniels,

2009, p. 36). The entire worlds writing systems,


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D. R. Olson

52 Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009

on this view, are representations of the spoken form

of language and for this reason are categorically dif-

ferent from non-linguistic forms of representation

such as gestures and drawings as well as notations for

number (but see Boone and Mignolo, 1994). While all

writing systems represent speech, the precise proper-

ties of speech captured by the visual signs differ fromlanguage to language. Some writing systems repre-

sent primarily phonemes (alphabets), some represent

syllables (syllabaries), some represent consonants

only (abjads), and yet others represent morphemes

(logosyllabic) or (abugidas), essentially one sign for

one word (Daniels, 2009). Although no functioning

writing system is completely true to type, writ-

ing systems representing languages which diverge

from the one-syllable, one-meaning pattern tend

to be more complex, were late to be invented, and

remain more difficult for children to master (Share,2008). Yet, because all writing systems represent the

spoken form of language, there is a basic similarity

in what they require of learners (Perfetti, 2009).

The cognitive implications of writing are rou-

tinely underestimated because of the unwarranted

assumption that as learners are already speakers of

a language, learning to read and write is primarily a

matter of learning visual signs for known elements

of speech. On the contrary, in learning any writing

system one is not merely learning a notation for rep-

resenting the known; rather, one is learning to thinkabout ones speech in terms of the constituent struc-

ture of the writing system. All writing systems tend

to preserve morphemes,1 roughly words, and conse-

quently morphemic signs are the easiest to learn while

at the same time providing a distinctive concept and

an enhanced awareness of single morphemes. Sylla-

baries, representing syllables, enhance an awareness

of single syllables; abjads, the awareness of single

consonants. Only alphabets further analyze syl-

lables into distinguishable phonemes with the con-

sequence that readers of alphabets develop conceptsof and a heightened awareness of single phonemes,

so-called, phonological awareness. In learning to

read and write, then, students are learning not only

how visual signs represent their speech, but also

about the properties of their speech that the visual

signs represent. Writing brings these aspects of lan-

guage into consciousness (Vygotsky, 1962; Harris,

1986, 1989, 2009; Olson, 1994).2 In speaking, ones

attention is drawn primarily to the topic, leaving the

linguistic form largely implicit, whereas in writing,

attention is drawn to the language about the topic.

The implications of writing derived from the vari-

ous levels of consciousness of language that writing

systems make available for the thinker to exploitfor some purpose. Lexicons, grammars, logics, and

specialized rhetorical forms or genres are among

the noteworthy products.

Furthermore, the implications of writing are

overlooked by an unjustifiable narrowness of the

conception of a writing system. A writing system is

not merely a phonological/morphological representa-

tion, a script, but a system for representing complex

linguistic forms or genres shaped to serve various

social and personal purposes. A letter, a word, a sen-

tence, a paragraph, an essay, a legal contract are allproperties of writing systems with particular sets of

conventions for their appropriate use, the mastery of

which helps to explain the somewhat diverse cogni-

tive implications of literacy.

Speech and writing rely on the same basic linguis-

tic resources, with the result that there is no absolute

or clear-cut line distinguishing speech from writing

(Finnegan, 1988). In most contexts, one may freely

translate from one to the other. Nonetheless, the pro-

duction and comprehension of verbal expressions

depend importantly on whether they are spoken orwritten (Chafe, 1985). Writing provides opportuni-

ties for re-writing in the design of documents suited

to the anticipated specialized contexts of compre-

hension and a written text provides opportunities for

re-reading, unlikely if not impossible in oral con-

texts. Even the request to Say that again usually

results in a new expression; precise verbal repetition

is reserved largely for poetry and song. Biber (2009)

has shown that the linguistic structure of spoken dis-

course, whether holding a conversation or teaching

a class, is little affected by purpose or genre. Spo-ken discourse, across a variety of purposes, reflects

constraints on production that result in simple

clauses joined by or interspersed with adverbials

such as you know or ok? Written discourse, on

the other hand, tends to have more complex clausal

and nominal structures such as the anticipated spe-

cialized contexts of comprehension (see above).
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Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009 53

A theory of reading/writing

Bibers analysis confirms the more general view that

oral language tends to be paratactic rather than

hypotactic, employing more coordinative and

thens rather than subordinative because or after

constructions. As Luhmann (2004) has noted A

written text opens up and organizes references to

possible meanings (p. 243).Furthermore, ways of writing and ways of read-

ing, regardless of how specialized they have become,

must ultimately be traced to ordinary communicative

uses of oral language. Just as the written law is an out-

growth of oral law, written texts are generally elabora-

tions of spoken ones. He did it! yields criminal law;

Thats mine yields property law; Ill do it yields

contract law and so on (Tiersma, 2008). Similarly,

written genres have their base in oral genres such

as stories, poems, and political discourse (Feldman,

1991). And many of the visual features that appear ina writing system, ranging from punctuation to pagina-

tion, reflect properties and structures that are implicit

in speech. Through re-reading and re-writing, writ-

ten texts can mark out these implicit features without

introducing radically new functions.

The relations between speaking and writing

can work in either direction. Linguistic struc-

tures worked up in the formation and mastery of

written genres can be carried back into speech,

for example, allowing one to speak like a book,

quibble over meanings, or articulate like a MissFiditch, Martin Jooss (1967) caricature of a pedantic

teacher. This, of course, complicates any simple test

for the implications of literacy as all literate forms,

to the extent they are mastered, may appear in oral

speech. Ivan Illich (1991), recognizing that literate

forms are often learned by people who themselves

do not read, made plea for research on lay literacy,

i.e. on the ways that non-readers relate to the literate

practices around them. Young children know a great

deal about literacy before they ever learn to read

(Ferreiro and Teberosky, 1982) and much of pho-nological awareness, important to literacy, is taught

orally.

Specialized uses of writing are the result of adapt-

ing the language to serve specialized social functions

such as keeping a genealogy, and writing poetry or

logical, expository prose. Each more specialized use

develops conventions for attending to one or more

special properties of language: sound and rhythm

for poetry, definition and implication for logical

prose. In both cases, attention is diverted from the

intended message to the restructuring of the linguis-

tic form. The genre, like the script itself, therefore,

recruits a particular form of linguistic awareness or

consciousness of language. In both speech and writ-ing, structure is adjusted to function, but in writing

this adjustment can be carried out on a far grander

scale because of writings unique features, the most

important of which is the fact that writing produces

a permanent artifact, subject to design.

1.1 How writing has been put to workin the Western intellectual traditionBecoming conscious of many important aspects of

linguistic form, by hypothesis an effect of literacy, isdifferent from competence in the use of language in

oral discourse. Speech is the product of a biological

process more or less comparable with walking, with

the consequence that learning how to talk results in

a body of implicit linguistic knowledge. Linguistic

examples are legion: one example, why can one

reverse a sentence containing the verb load thus,

John loaded the wagon with hay into John loaded

hay into the wagon, whereas a sentence containing

a verb like fill cannot? We know implicitly in the

sense that we could recognize the violation, but wedo not know explicitly or metalinguistically the rule

informing our decision.3 Some metalinguistic knowl-

edge, which is relevant to reported speech, concepts

such as ask, say, tell, promise, lie, and the

like are acquired along with language itself. More

specialized metalinguistic knowledge, and with it

consciousness, of particular aspects of linguistic

form such as phonemes, words, sentences, and some

specialized genre, on the other hand, is an histori-

cal process, with different properties discovered at

different times in different cultures and used for par-ticular purposes largely as a part of a written tradi-

tion (Havelock, 1982). Once learned, as mentioned,

this consciousness is applicable to oral speech as

well as to ones writing. Thus, phonological aware-

ness is a product of an alphabetic tradition although

it may be taught orally. Research has examined other

aspects of linguistic form that appear to be products
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of a literate tradition, and the case for the concept of

word has special relevance.

Anthropologists, including Goody (1986) and

Finnegan (1988), pointed out that the traditional (i.e.

non-literate) cultures they studied lacked a concept

of word. Expressions conveying the same meaning

were said to be the same words. A similar pattern hasbeen reported for pre-reading children (Piaget, 1962;

Homer and Olson, 1999) and non-reading adults

(Scholes and Willis, 1991; Petersson et al., 2009).

Classicist J. P. Small (1997) suggests that even Plato

lacked a concept of word; he worked with the con-

cept of idea. Plato asked what kind of a thing justice

was, not the meaning of the word justice. So too

for the concept of truth. Havelock (1982) traced

such debates to the beginning of writing. Kneale

and Kneale (1962) showed that Aristotle seems not

to be aware of any difference between the use ofa word or a symbol to refer to an object and mere

mention of that word or symbol. Although children

universally play language games such as singsongs,

rhymes, teasing, and the like it is unlikely, although

it remains to be seen, if members of non-literate

societies play word games such as naming synonyms

and antonyms, riddles, and puns. Word association

tests indicate that pre-literate children, given a word,

use it to complete a sentence; older, literate children

tend to provide a term from the same syntactic class,

often a synonym or an antonym, the well-knownsyntagmaticparadigmatic shift. This shift, often

taken as developmental, may at least in part be the

product of literacy.4

Yet, some anthropologists such as Halverson

(1992, p. 304) deny any link between literacy and

knowledge about language. Karmiloff-Smith (1992)

has argued that metalinguistic knowledge is a

straightforward developmental effect of childrens

natural tendency to re-represent their knowledge

more abstractly, thereby producing abstract concepts

such as word and sentence. Halverson asks Are weto suppose that no one before Socrates ever asked

the meaning of a word? This question, in my view,

confuses a speakers knowledge of the language

with knowledge about the language. It is a ques-

tion about reference, what the speaker meant, rather

than a question of what the word means, that is, its

relation to other words and linguistic meaning.

Only the latter is, by hypothesis, linked to the dic-

tionary making habits of a literate society. Johnson

(2009, p. 322) examined the reading and discourse

habits of ancient Rome and reported that philological

quibbles abound. He describes a typical scene in the

second-century Roman home of Cornelius Fronto, an

intellectual of his day, which shows clearly the newattitude to words that literacy fostered:

Fronto, ill with gout, reclines on a little Greek

sickbed surrounded on all sides by men

renowned for intellectual capacity, birth, or

wealth. Fronto is busy with some builders,

discussing plans for adding a new bath

complex. To a remark by one of the builders,

one of Frontos friends interjects a comment

that, as it happens, contains the expression,

praeterpropter, more or less. Fronto stopsall conversation at once, looks at his friend,

and asks what praeterpropter means. The

friend demurs, referring the question to

a celebrated grammarian sitting nearby. The

grammarian dismisses the question hardly

deserving the honor of the inquiry because

the word is an utterly plebeian expression,

the idiom of workers rather than of cultivated

men. Fronto objects: how can praeterpropter

be a lowly expression when Cato and Varro

and other early writers use it? [Another]

interposes the information that the word is

used in the Iphigeneia of Ennius, and asks

that the bookroll itself be produced. It is, and

the chorus containing the word is read. The

defeated grammarian, sweating and blushing,

beats a hasty exit to the loud laughter of many;

whereupon a general exodus ensues.

This is the sort of attention to the words predicted

by a theory of writing but denied by critics such as

Halverson (1992) who, as we have seen, scoffed at

the idea of a link between literacy and word knowl-edge and further argued that The medium of com-

munication has no intrinsic significance in the

development of logical thought processes (p. 314).

Contrary to this claim is the fact that vocabulary

knowledge is the best indicator, both as predictor

and consequence, of literacy development in children

(Biemiller, 2003).
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The concept of a word defined in terms of other

words was a late, historical development. Prior to

the Reformation, the Greek word logos was trans-

lated as sermon, a preached oral expression, rather

than as verbum, the word as linguistic item. While

Aristotle rejected poetic utterances such as The salt

sea is the sweat of the earth as a suitable basis forinference, Leezenberg (2001) has shown that Aristo-

tle lacked the conception of metaphor that we, since

Locke (1690/1961), have taken for granted, namely,

as deviant from an otherwise neutral form of literal

language (p. 40). He concludes that literal mean-

ings, then, are not the start of the life of the language,

but rather the end product of a long social and his-

torical process Literal meanings depend on the

stabilization and codification of linguistic norms;

these are achieved with the aid of literacy, educa-

tion, standardization of language and lexicography(p. 302). Rather than taking consciousness of lan-

guage as a given, then, there is compelling evidence

that such awareness is a historical process, tied to

a written tradition.

It has long been clear that the same texts have

been read, that is used, in different ways at differ-

ent historical periods, an awareness that has given

rise to the study of the history of reading associat-

ing particular ways of reading with broad historical

periods such as the age of reason or the age of

faith and so on. Beryl Smalley (1941) in her classicThe Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages pointed

out that in the Middle Ages, the relation between

the words and their meanings was assimilated to

the religious distinction between the body and the

spirit. The purpose of reading (or listening to) a text

was to see through the text to the spirit: Blessed

are the eyes which see divine spirit through the

letters veil as one cleric put it (Smalley, 1941,

p. 1). Historian Karl Morrison (1990, p. 68) agreed:

[Twelfth-century] readers would peruse texts with

a kind of redactive criticism, editing them and seek-ing epiphanies between the lines. Clearly, that was

the age of faith, although many continue to read, at

least in particular contexts, just that way. Seeking

hidden meanings behind the text contrasts with the

way of reading we associate with the modern era,

namely, a way of reading that hews close to the

so-called literal meaning of the text.

The concept of literal meaning, as Leezenberg

suggested, took a definitive turn in the debates

surrounding the Protestant Reformation. The reform-

ers, led by Martin Luther and William Tyndale,

translated the Bible into vernacular languages and

through the printing press made copies available to

an increasingly literate laity in the 1530s. Their revo-lutionary moves were to insist that religious author-

ity lay in scripture alone,sola scriptura, and further

that scripture needed no interpretation, sui ipsius

interpres, it literally meant what it said, the meaning

available, indeed obvious to any reader. The Council

of Trent in 1546, in response, reaffirmed the claim

that the Catholic Church had the exclusive right to

judge the true sense and interpretation of Holy Scrip-

ture. These differences indicate a decisive moment

in the history of reading in that they reflect different

reading practices (Simpson, 2007, p. 67), that is,different modes of interpretation. Yet both sides of

these debates came to rely increasingly on the ver-

bal, textual properties of the written text as the basis

for their arguments rather than on the kind of oral

debates that had characterized sermons and trials for

heresy. Simpson (2007, p. 190) concludes: It signals

the moment in which written documents replace

verbal persuasion. And it indicates that documents

came to be used in a new way. Through the middle

ages, oral discourse remained primary, with writ-

ing being used rather to train and enhance memory(Small, 1997, p. 8). It was only during the renais-

sance and in the hands of the humanists, and espe-

cially the Protestants, that texts came to be seen as

working documents with a strict literal meaning.5

This new way of reading brought a way of look-

ing at language, namely its literal meaning, into con-

sciousness and established a new linguistic norm

or standard. The tradition, sometimes referred to as

Modernism, continues to monopolize the language

of schooling, a language that requires a scrupulous

attention to the very words (Donaldson, 1978). Thisscrupulous attention to the very words, a historical

product of literacy, is essential to what some psy-

chologists have labeled rationality (Kahneman and

Tversky, 1996; Stanovich, 1999, 2009). Such ratio-

nality may be better labeled as textual rationality,

rationality that is shaped to work with literal mean-

ings of de-contextualized texts within a documentary
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tradition (Smith and Schryer, 2009). Highly liter-

ate people are attuned to trick verbal questions

such as: I have in my hand two coins that together

add up to 30 cents. One of them is not a nickel. What

is the other one?6 The correct answer, of course, is

that the other one is. Metalinguistic training in the

analysis of possible meanings of ambiguous wordsis a literate practice that has been shown to foster

reading comprehension (Yuill, 2009).

The irony of the Protestant revolution in the way

of reading was that reading literally is now seen as

largely inappropriate to reading Scripture, which, if

it is to be read in a historically valid way, should be

read as poetic rather than scientific, as Frye (1982)

has pointed out. But that literal way of reading was

appropriate to and was adopted for Early Modern

Science. Social theorists have long linked Protes-

tantism and the rise of Early Modern Science, butrecent theorists have found a more direct link in their

shared theory of reading. It has been argued that

the more or less technical procedures for Protestant

biblical exegesis, with its focus on the literal mean-

ing of written scripture were transferred directly

to the reading of the world (Olson, 1994, Ch. 8;

Harrison, 1998; Forshaw and Killeen, 2007). The

conceptual links are as follows: Protestant hermeneu-

tics, their way of reading, took the Scripture as fixed

in the sense that anyone reading it for oneself would

encounter exactly the same replicable, observabletext. Indeed, a distinguishing feature of renaissance

humanism, generally, was its devotion to determin-

ing the correct original of ancient texts, removing

errors, interpolations, mistranslations, duplications,

and the like. The printing press made that fixed

version visible, locatable, and readily available to

all readers thereby enhancing its apparent fixity.

Second, the meaning expressed by that fixed form

was assumed to be its direct literal meaning, a mean-

ing derived from a careful reading of the words in

their context rather than requiring interpretation bythe reader; texts, as they assumed, literally meant

what they said. Interpretation became a perjorative

term. Third, the meanings so delivered were avail-

able to the ordinary reader and dependent on nei-

ther outside authority nor hidden presuppositions.

All of these ran counter to the prevailing attitude to

Scripture endorsed by the Church that set the literal

amongst other more figurative meanings, saw the

fixity of the Scripture as the product of the living

church, and, as mentioned, claimed authority over

interpretation, the principle enshrined in the Council

of Trent.

This Protestant epistemology, then, assumed thefixity and replicability of the text, the direct literal,

non-metaphorical accounts of what those texts said,

the presumed availability of meaning to the common,

lay reader, and the absence of an ecclesial authority

to regulate interpretation. It was this epistemology

that was directly applicable to reading the book of

nature, that is to seventeenth-century Early Modern

Science. The relation is not allegorical but rather, it

is argued, the direct transfer of a method of reading

evolved in one context, the Book of Scripture, for

application to a different one, the Book of Nature.Early Modern Science was based on the careful

observation of Nature, the ocula testa, the testimony

of the eye. The science included Cassianos observa-

tions and precise drawings of species of plants and

animals (Freedberg, 2002), Galileos visual evidence

for the moons of Jupiter, Robert Hookes observa-

tions with a microscope, and Robert Boyles experi-

ments with the vacuum jar, and so on. These early

modern scientists all assumed that observations were

replicable, reflecting a fixed world, that descriptions

were transparent to and literally descriptive of, thatobserved world, and that any unbiased eye would see

just what they had seen. Facts were what anyone,

not only the authorities, could see. Scientific reports

turned readers into virtual witnesses. Hypotheses,

conjectures, and the like were clearly man-made

and could, therefore, be contested (Shapin, 1984,

p. 502). The artifice of the laboratory was sometimes

necessary for assuring that natural events were fixed

texts, replicable and visible to any observer.

It was not only the early modern scientists, influ-

enced by this so-called Protestant way of reading,who looked at the world in a new way. Svetlana

Alpers (1983) has found a striking link between

the rise of Protestantism and the development of

Northern European, primarily Dutch, art of the sev-

enteenth century. Alpers shows that not only were

participants well known to each other, but also the
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factual accounts of nature provided by the early

modern scientists correspond to the equally factual,

descriptive depictions of real situations produced

by such artists as Hoogstratten and Vermeer.

Indeed, Hoogstratten, a student of Rembrandt,

went so far as to criticize the Italian Renaissance

tradition of which Michaelangelo and Raphael wereleading exponents, for emphasizing beauty over

truth in art, and he chides those who readmeanings

into the clouds of the sky (Alpers, 1983, p. 77).

Hoogstratten rejected allegorical paintings, and

urged painters to use their eyes to see clouds as

clouds and not as symbols of the heavens!

Dutch artists exemplified in their art just what the

early modern scientists had pursued in their science.

It was a refrain that Bacon (1620/1965, p. 323) later

expressed in his Great Instauration:

All depends upon keeping the eye steadily

fixed upon the facts of nature and so receiving

their images simply as they are. For God forbid

that we should give out a dream of our own

imagination for a pattern in the world.

A way of reading, based on a set of literate/

literary conventionsfixity of text, a given literal

meaning, open to the common man, shared by a

textual community, defined a new social group

independent of political and religious authority, first

in the Protestant churches and then in early modernscientific communities and Dutch schools of art. The

new way of reading succeeded by bringing into con-

sciousness a particular set of properties of language

while setting aside others in the interest of advanc-

ing a novel mode of thought, a mode of thought,

it may be added, that to modern readers seems

entirely commonsensical.

2 Reading and Literature

Theories of literature overlap to a great extent with

the more general history of reading. Literary theorist

Northrop Frye (1947) saw all rhetorical or discourse

forms, roughly genres, such as epic and drama,

poetry and prose, tragedy and comedy falling into

two categories: descriptive and philosophical on one

hand, and subjective and imaginative on the other.

In later work (Frye, 1982), he added a historical

dimension to literature by showing how three basic

types of literary form evolved over time to suit more

specialized functions. For Homer and pre-Biblical

cultures of the Near East as well as in much of the Old

Testament, the conception of language, he argued,is poetic, founded on myth and metaphor, and car-

rying power much like curses, spells and charms,

and other forms of enchantment. Frye described the

second stage as logical and associated it with Plato

and with the invention of continuous prose. Here,

the conception of language is metonymic, express-

ing propositions that stand in for objects and their

logical relations. Commentary, paraphrase, and con-

strual become central literary forms in this tradition.

Regarding the third phase, Frye identified it as the

descriptive phase of language, concerned primar-ily with truth and evidence, a form that takes shape

beginning in the sixteenth-century renaissance, the

reformation and the rise of early modern, empirical

science as well as literary fiction.

Although Frye did not assign a particular place

for writing in his analysis, it seems fair to say that the

first phase is predominantly oral, composed with-

out writing. Indeed, Havelock (1982) argued that

the writing down of the orally composed and per-

formed Homeric epics was the major turning point in

Western cultural evolution, leading to Fryes sec-ond stage in which attention came to be focused on

intended meaning and logical form that developed

in classical Greece and Rome. Here, too, questions

have been raised regarding the role that literacy

played in the evolution of logical modes of thought.

Locke (1690/1961) was adamant that reasoning was

a universal human competence, dependent on neither

literacy nor training. He wrote:

But God has not been so sparing to men, to

make them barely two-legged creatures, andleft it to Aristotle to make them rational He

has given them a mind that can reason without

being instructed in methods of syllogizing; the

understanding is not taught to reason by these

rules, it has a native faculty to perceive the

coherence or incoherence of its ideas, and can
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range them right without any such perplexing

repetitions (pp. 2645).

A similar view has been defended by Scribner

and Cole (1981) and by Halverson (1992), both of

whom show that all humans are rational, capable of

basing their behavior and beliefs on reasons. Butagain, the claims for literacy are based on meta-

linguistic or reflexive awareness of the form of

argument and its use as a distinctive mode of dis-

course, and here the claims for literacy seem more

firmly established. Discursive, logical prose, it may

be argued, is an historical achievement dependent

upon literacy.

Fryes third stage relies on a conscious distinc-

tion between literal and other forms of meaning, the

evolution of which we associated earlier with Protes-

tantism and early modern science.To Fryes account of the poetic/metaphorical,

logical/propositional, and empirical/descriptive modes,

Banfield (1993) added a fourth, the modernist/

subjectivist form of literature. She pointed out that in

all written literature no you exists, the I may not be

the speaker/writer and the now may be co-temporal

with the past (if the introductory clause is past). Some

modern writers such as Jane Austen, Gustav Flabert,

Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf invented

means for capturing the subjectivity of experience

by means of what has been called style indirect

libre. For example, Austin inMansfield Parkwrites:

It must have the strangest appearance! The excla-

mation mark indicates that the strangeness is appar-

ent even to the writer, not only the character. Further,

strange to whom is not indicated in the text and is

to be shared by the character, writer, and reader.

As Welty (1981, p. viii) in her foreward to Woolfs

To the Lighthouse notes: From its beginning,

the novel never departs from the subjective. She

achieves this by blurring the lines between direct

quotation and reported thought that gives the reader

the sensation of looking into the actual workings ofthe characters minds (Olson and Oatley, manuscript

in preparation).

2.1 How writing works its magicI have argued that writing and reading in the West

are cultural practices that have evolved through

historical time by diverting attention to specific

properties that were implicit in spoken language,

primarily knowledge of words and sentences, to

permit important and novel ways of reading.

Writing works its magic by virtue of a pair of

facts. First, it provides a permanent visible arti-

fact, an object that endures through time and acrossspace. Second, this artifact represents and makes

available for analysis and specialization, aspects of

linguistic form appropriate to particular communi-

cative purposes. As a permanent artifact, a written

record provides manifold opportunities for revision

in writing as well as opportunities for re-reading,

opportunities that exist to a far lesser extent in

speech. As mentioned, in speaking, one must make

moment-to-moment readjustments to the social

demands of the listeners, a fact that tends to make the

speech more rhetorical, sometimes at the expense oflogical coherence. In writing, these immediate social

demands are relaxed, allowing, in some contexts,

more attention to the properties and constraints of

the literary form both in the act of creation and, more

importantly, in revising the product. And secondly,

as a representation of language, the written form

offers opportunities for re-reading and re-writing by

exploring, bringing into consciousness the implicit

properties of language.

Revision, as Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987)

pointed out, is the process of adjusting content tofit the rhetorical form, that is, the conventions of

a genre. In a simple case, one may sort through

alternative words for one that rhymes or for an

appropriate metaphor if the genre, say a love poem,

calls for it. The writer is armed with an assortment

of knowledge along with some rhetorical frame,

whether love poem, letter of resignation, or narrative

fiction, and the writers task is to use that frame as

a means for retrieving and organizing information.

Each genre requires that a writer attend to particular

properties of the linguistic formsound for poetry,precise word meaning, and logical form for explana-

tory prose. And those are the properties discovered

or invented as part of the history of literacy or, as we

say, the history of reading. Just what these properties

are is indicated by the topics deemed worth teaching

in any college composition textbookthe word, the

clause, the sentence, the genre, etc.
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Revision is work on paper in the sense that

it is interacting with the written form somewhat

independently of the intentions of the writer.

Clark (2008) cites an exchange between Nobel-

prize winning physicist Richard Feynman and

the historian of science Charles Weiner. Weiner

had come upon some of Feynmans originalnotes that he characterized as Feynmans record

of day-to-day work. Feynman contested the

description saying I actually did the work on the

paper Its not a record, not really. Its working.

You have to work on paper and this is the paper.

Okay? (Gleick, 1993, p. 409). The same is true

of revision generally: The formation of [explicit

verbal] concepts itself becomes in this way for

the first time an object of conscious deliberation

and control (Brandom, 1994, p. xx).

How do we work on paper? The primary fea-ture of writing is that it produces an artifact that,

relative to speech, is an object fixed in space and

enduring through time. Yet, it is a mistake to see

writing as merely an extension of memory. The

written expression is subject to both re-reading and

revising. Understanding revision, in turn, requires

that we make clear what is subject to revision.

It is not only that the writer is clarifying ideas.

The re-reader is no longer faced with an intention

but rather a visible object, on paper. This visible

object is no longer the utterance but a record ofthe utterance as captured by a particular writing

systema series of letters, words, sentences, and

paragraphs. And, critically, the interpretation of this

record may be different from the interpretation of the

original oral utterance.

The relations between utterance and the record

of that utterance are not unique to writing but

rather, it may be argued, an outgrowth of a device

present in speech for setting language off-line;

this is the syntactic device of quotation. What is

enclosed within quotation marks is to be treated dif-ferently than a direct utterance; it is, as logicians

say, opaque. The same contrast may be drawn by

pointing out that direct speech is heard whereas

quoted speech, and most writing,7 is overheard.

In writing, as in quoted speech, we are encoun-

tering language that has a unique relation to us

as readers or overhearers. We may depict this

relation as follows:

Speaker/Author utterance Addressee/

Audience

(Direct)

Narrator/Reporter text Reader/

Overhearer

(Indirect)

In ordinary direct discourse, spoken or written,

a speaker or author produces an utterance attuned

and directed to an addressee, a known and intended

audience, large or small. Writing, like storytelling,

turns the speaker/writer into a narrator or reporter

who produces a fixed artifact, a text, which reaches

an often anonymous reader or overhearer, thus,

indirectly. This indirect mode, as suggested, borrows

the properties of quotation. Oral narrative shares thisindirect route, but only in writing does this expres-

sion become a fixed text, subject to re-reading and

to revision. Readers, like overhearers, are isolated

to some extent from the original intention of the

speaker/writer and have at their disposal a linguis-

tic structure that they are free to use for their own

purposes. Writers, conversely, are free to act on the

quoted expression as an artifact subject to revision.

This is working on paper as discussed above. The

producer moves from author to narrator and the

receiver shifts from audience to reader.The psychological implications of literacy, then,

derive from the fact that writing, unlike speech,

provides a permanent artifact that, under certain

conditions, may be treated as: (1) fixed and unchang-

ing upon re-reading; (2) subject to reinterpretation

by a reader; and (3) subject to re-design by a writer.

As a fixed object, writing is subject to various forms

of linguistic and grammatical analysis depending

upon the properties of language that the writing

system represents; as an object subject to revision,

it becomes an instrument of thought. These are thevery resources that allow reading to have a history

and have made writing and reading primary influ-

ences in the shaping of the modern world.

Reading and writing operate on quoted expres-

sions. Operating on a written expression differs from

the way one operates on or processes a direct utter-

ance, an assertion, or an imperative, for example.
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D. R. Olson


If John says There is a unicorn in the garden, one

takes it as an expression of Johns belief. But if John

says James Thurber said Theres a unicorn in the

garden , we need not, indeed should not, infer that

John thinks that there is a unicorn in the garden.

Quotation separates the attitude of believing from

the content believed, leaving the latter to serve asa novel object of thought. It is to Gotlieb Frege

(Geach and Black, 1960) that we owe the notion

that the content of an utterance may be distinguished

from its judgment, what is said from what is asserted

as true, for example. Frege wrote:

If words are used in the ordinary way, what

one intends to speak of is their reference [i.e.

their truth value]. when words of another

are quoted ones own words then first

designate words of the other speaker, andonly the latter have their usual reference.

In reported speech one talks about the sense,

e.g., of another persons remarks. It is quite

clear that in this way of speaking words do not

have their customary reference but designate

what is usually their sense [pp. 589] The

indirect reference of a word is accordingly its

customary sense. The thought, accordingly,

cannot be the reference of the sentence, but

must rather be considered as the sense (p. 62).

This distinction is fully explored in the theoryof speech acts (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and

exploited in written composition which frees lan-

guage from the speech act (Banfield, 1993, p. 357).

The grammatical device that achieves this split is

quotation, the device which separates and preserves

the content while setting aside the judgment. That

is, in quotation one may quote the content without

either agreeing or disagreeing with it. One could

argue along with Frege that indirect discourse,

as in quotation, is what makes conceptual thought

possible in that it detaches the content both fromthe utterer or writer and from its usual reference.

Conceptual thought is entertaining some content

without either asserting or denying it, but then turn-

ing it to ones own use in our own interpretation.

Reading and writing are actions on those quoted

expressions that turn them back into intended mean-

ings, what Oatley and Djikic (2008) have described

as running simulations. Different ways of structuring

these quoted expressions and different ways of inter-

preting them define characteristic ways of reading as

well as the characteristic genre of literature.

Our discussion of the relation between literacy

and metalinguistic representations of language

has focused primarily on the device of quotation.Quotation is a metalinguistic device that turns lan-

guage upon itself, that is, a reflexive use of lan-

guage. Lucy (1993, p. 11) distinguishes two types

of reflexive language: reported speech, as we have

discussed above, and metalinguistic form, which

distinguishes use from mention as for example

when we say that dog is a word. Some modern

writers such as Banville in The Sea have the nar-

rator comment on the choice of words, a metalin-

guistic rather than a quotational move. He writes:

There goes the Colonel creeping back to his room.That was a long session in the lav. Strangury,

nice word. Adept readers may infer the mean-

ing of the word but it is to be found only in the

unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, a disease

that makes urination difficult, common to older

men. Banville turns from the urinary condition to

a metalinguistic comment on the word itself.

While literacy is important to both quoted speech

and metalinguistic commentary, it is possible that

literacy is more uniquely associated with the latter.

This hypothesis remains to be investigated.8

2.2 Generic ways of reading/writingin the Western traditionAll the ways of using and understanding language

are available in ordinary spoken discourse. Metaphor

and simile are common in all speech, any expres-

sion may be quoted and commented on, statements

may be judged true or false, assertions agreed or dis-

agreed with, and intentions and feelings discussed.

Ways of writing and reading exploit these linguis-tic resources in extended discourse by putting them

off-line by means of quotation, displacing language

from its immediate context of use, to create an object

subject to re-reading and design for particular pur-

poses. The result is literature with its diverse ways

of reading and its models of rationality. We may

summarize them briefly.
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2.2.1 The poetic way of reading

Following Frye, the poetic includes all fictional,

imaginative ways of using language in continuous

discourse, including poetry and drama, stories and

sermons, some of which are oral, some written. What

they share is that they are continuous or monologi-

cal, from one producer, and that they all involve dis-

placed speech, what we have called quotation. Quoted

expressions, separated from the present speaker, are

thoughts rather than beliefs. In this way, literature,

as Coleridge said, requires the willing suspension

of disbelief. A literary form is not a natural or pri-

mary form of language, and it requires learning of

the special convention for treating the expression as

if in quotation marks. To young children, stories are

as real as any other assertion. That is, children have

some difficulty in recognizing that stories as just

thoughts. Janet Astington (personal communication,2001) reported a child who requested that a certain

story should not be read because it is too scary!

Children, we may say, must learn to treat the texts as

divorced from direct speech.

2.2.2 The invention of prose

Fryes second way of writing expresses and invites

a second way of reading. It adopts all the proper-

ties of the first way, namely, the distinction between

quoted meaning and reality, but it adds a new prop-

erty, the systematic attention to the lexical and logi-cal properties of language. Even quoted expressions

have entailments. By pursuing them, one may build

up elaborate conceptual schemes tied together on the

basis of definitions, distinctions, causal and logical

implications, and the like in order to examine such

concepts as justice, knowledge, truth, and reality,

the traditional topics of philosophical discourse. The

permanent record allows re-reading and re-writing

and thus allows the discourse to progress to magiste-

rial levels in the hands of thinkers such as Aquinas.

This way of reading requires that one pay scrupulousattention to wording, assumptions, and to the truth-

preserving functions of logic. Validity rather than

empirical truth is the primary normative constraint.

2.2.3 Reading as empirical description

In this third way of reading, the reader not only treats

thoughts and the logical relations amongst them as

in the first two ways, but also reads expressions as

true of some reality. This, of course, is the primary

function of speaking, but is among the last to acquire

a set of normative constraints for reading and writ-

ing continuous discourse. These include rules for

picking out observables and a strictly literal set of

descriptions. The literal meanings taken as central toProtestant hermeneutics and to early modern science

are paradigmatic of this way of writing and reading.

2.2.4 Modernist/subjectivist ways of reading

Reading and writing descriptive prose may be

applied equally to the physical world and to the sub-

jective experiences of persons so long as they are

written from the outside, from a narrative stance;

Galileo and Descartes shared a way of reading. The

fourth way of reading requires, rather, the explora-

tion of shared subjectivities between writers andreaders. This was the invention of the indirect free

style shared by Austin, Woolf, and other modern

novelists. There are two results, the heightened

awareness of personal, private perspectives or sub-

jectivity, and a heightened self-consciousness of the

reader.

To conclude, writing systems are means for

exploring the implicit properties of speech. These

properties, when conventionalized in extended

discourse, become the forms of literature that are

adapted to a variety of social and personal functions.Each way of using the language brings with it a new

way of using the mind. It begins with, but does not

end with, the invention of a script for representing

what was said.

ReferencesAlpers, S. (1983). The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the

Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bacon, F. (1620/1965). The great instauration. In

Warhaft, S. (ed.), Francis Bacon: A Selection of His

Works. Toronto: Macmillan, pp. 298324.

Banfield, A. (1993). Where epistemology, style, and

grammar meet literary history: the development of
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1. a theory of reading or writing

Documents