Ramona Fernandez

Imagining Literacy

Rhizomes of Knowledge in American Culture and Literature

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Texas Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. August 2001
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 396g
• ISBN-13: 9780292725225
• ISBN-10: 0292725221
• Artikelnr.: 26100586

Autorenporträt

By Ramona Fernandez

Inhaltsangabe

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