PRINT LANGUAGE, LITERATE CULTURE

Written Language, textual culture.

The technology of writing and printing has changed the medium of language use and the way we
think and talk about culture.
At around 3000 BC, the oral tradition was transformed into the written tradition, and the texts
were passed on to later generations by scribes, who were professional copyists, before the
invention of automatic printing.
● Chinese believed that by copying, the ancestors got embodied anew into new generations.
● Judaic and Christians believed that to recover the original truths dispensed orally by God
they had to study and interpret the sacred text.
This culture of the text and the respect for / obedience to textual authority illustrates the dilemma
represented by the invention of writing = while it permits record-keeping and making tradition
into scripture, with the passing of time the written texts lose the original meaning, and can only
be understood bt latter day commentators or translators.

Print and Power

Traditionally, Institutional power ensured cultural continuity by allowing only certain people to
interpret texts, to avoid cultural change. Medieval times: Scribes, monks.
With the advent of print culture, there was no need to hand out copied texts, and so scribes
disappeared.
With the translation of the Bible into vernacular German by Martin Luther in 1533, sacred truths
were available to all.
Then, the interpretative authority and censorship by secular powers (=not religious, press, or
political institutions), which are in control of new technologies.
This academic monopoly relates to the formal linguistic aspects of the texts and not to their spirit,
unaffiliated with the reader’s response and interpretation.

The social construction of literacy (=the ability to read and write)

Historically, the idea that governed was that of the primitive vs. civilized dichotomy implied by
the theory of the great divide between oral culture and literate culture.
Nowadays, that idea falls short due to the rise of the idea of multiple literacies: a plural set of
practices within social contexts of use (Literary, scientific, press literacy), which has to do with
the mastery of social uses of print language. So, Literacy is not only encoding and decoding the
written word but also understanding and manipulating social and cultural meanings of print
language in thoughts, feelings and actions.
Mastery of the Written Medium: Viewing a stretch of written language as a text.
Social Practice: Viewing a stretch of written language as discourse.
Literacy is not acquired naturally, it is learned in schools, from the prizing of certain uses of
language over others, spoken or written, usually stemming from the belief that context-reduced,
topic-centred literacy is useful in all aspects of life. However, in some aspects, other types of
literacy are required, not imparted by schools.
Children from different social backgrounds bring different types of literacy since it is linked to
values, social practices, and ways of knowing promoted in educational institutions.
Text and Discourse
The notion of text views a stretch of written language as the product of an identifiable intention
of the author, and its relation to its context of culture as fixed and stable. Text meaning is seen as
identical with the semantic signs it is composed of:
● Text explication: retrieves the author’s intended meaning
● Text deconstruction: explores the association evoked in the text.
This notion, however, does not take into account what happens in the mind of the readers nor the
social context of reception and productions. These processes are the characteristics of discourse.
A text cannot be given fuller meaning if it is not viewed as discourse too. Prior experience and
prior texts are not sufficient to render a text coherent, in order to do so, we have to draw on the
text’s purpose and its conditions of production.

Literacy event, prior text, point of view

The interaction of the reader with a text is a literacy event, which is defined by members’
common social practices with written language and common ways of interpreting these practices.
The knowledge that goes into literacy events draws on the larger cultural and historical context of
production and reception of texts in a particular discourse community.
Without the author or interpreters, the readers have to reconstitute their understanding of the
context. The context for a literacy event includes a situational and cultural dimension. The
situational context includes
● Events captured in propositional content
● The intended audience
● Text’s purpose + Every text attempts to have a cognitive and emotional effect on its
readers or to prompt its readers to action (perlocutionary value)
● The text’s register, or functional language variation according to the audience.
● Its key, the mark of the narrator’s stance
The cultural and socio-historical dimension, related to other texts and communal knowledge in
general.
● Prior texts: every text is a response to a prior text or prior issues raised through language.
This prior text has been accumulated over the life of a discourse community: the
Discourse (capital D). Discourses are ways of being in the world or forms of life that
integrate words, values, and social identities.
● Point of View: Considered in three senses
○ Spatio-temporal POV: physical context
○ Psychological POV: perspective adopted by the narrator
○ Ideological POV: the system of beliefs and values by reference to which the
narrator comprehends the world and indexes the type of discourse community the
narrator belongs to.
Discourse communities constitute common purposes and interests, and implicity share a stock of
prior texts and ideological povs, which encourage among their members’ common norms The
pressure to conform to them is exerted by the secular powers. Thus, the notion of literacy event
leads inevitably to a consideration of the notion of genre.
Genre
Genre is a socially sanctioned type of communicative event, either written or spoken. A
sociocultural perspective is always dependent on being perceived as such within a specific
context of situation or culture.
What turns a collection of communicative events into a genre is some conventionalized set of
communicative purposes.
One can learn about a discourse community’s culture by looking at the names it gives to genres,
for genre is society’s way of defining and controlling meaning. The concept of text type
establishes constraints on what one is expected to write about, in what form, and for what
audience.

LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL IDENTITY.

*A Haitian writer. Edmond Laforest killed himself with a Larousse dictionary tied to his neck*
The association of language with a person’s sense of self is shown in his action.

Cultural Identity.
There is a natural connection between the language spoken by members of a social group and that
group’s identity. By their accent, vocab, and discourse patterns, speakers identify themselves and
are identified as members of different speech and discourse communities, so they get a sense of
social importance from using the same language as the group they belong to. In modern,
historically complex, open societies, it is much more difficult to define the boundaries of any
particular social group and the linguistic and cultural identities of its members.
Despite the belief that one language = one culture, there is no necessary correlation between a
given racial characteristic and the use of a given language or variety of languages.
Individuals assume several collective identities that are likely not only to change over time in
dialogue with other but are liable to be in conflict with one another,

Cultural stereotypes
Our perception of someone’s cultural identity is very much culturally determined. What we
perceive about a person’s culture and language is what we have been conditioned by our own
culture to see, and the stereotypical models already built around our own. Grupo identity is a
question of focusing (the linguistic marking of elements within a sentence or utterance) and
diffusion (causes languages to borrow elements from each other and create new ways of
speaking) of ethnic, racial, and national concepts or stereotypes.

Language crossing as an act of identity

One way of surviving culturally in an immigration setting is to exploit the endless variety of
meanings afforded by participation in several discourse communities at once.
To choose one way of talking over another depending on the topic, interlocutor and situational
context is to use language crossing, which is frequent in inter-ethnic communication. By
crossing languages, speakers perform cultural acts of identity.
Refusing to adopt the same language when you are seen as belonging to the same culture can be
perceived as an affront (ofensa) that requires some facework (mediation of the intersection
between an individual's private self-conception and the individual's need to cooperate in a
society) repair.
Language crossing can also be used for more complex stances by speakers who wish to display
multiple cultural memberships and play off one against the other. Speakers who belong to several
cultures insert the intonation of one language as citational inserts into the other to distance
themselves from alternative identities or mock several cultural identities by stylizing, parodying,
or stereotyping them all if it suits their social purposes of the moment.
Cultural identity is a question of indenture to a language spoken or imposed by others, and
persona, emotional investment in that language through the apprenticeship that went into
acquiring it.