Literature Review Example Two

The world on paper: The conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading.
by David R. Olson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp xix & 318.

Reviewed by Alastair Pennycook in Melbourne Papers in Applied Linguistics, Vol 8, #2, pp 113-118

Task

Read the review of Olson, and come to a decision about how positive or negative you think Pennycook is about the book he’s reviewing.
Go through the Review, underlining or highlighting all those expressions where the writer is clearly making a judgement (not just describing) the book he’s reviewing
Preferably with a colleague, work out what the writer’s viewpoint and main arguments are. Identify those points in the text that support your interpretation.

Olson's book is a broad and fascinating tour through a range of significant concerns in literacy. It brings together, and nicely summarises, the key work by Ong, Havelock, Goody and others, while at the same time presenting the author's particular position on and research in this area. Organised around chapters such as "Literacy and the conceptual revolutions of Classical Greece and Renaissance Europe" (Chapter 3), "What writing represents: a revisionist history of writing" (4), "A history of reading: from the spirit of the text to the intentions of the author" (7), "Reading the book of Nature: the conceptual origins of early modern science" (8), "A history of written discourse: from mnemonics to representations" (9) or "Representing the mind: the origins of subjectivity" (11), this is a book that takes the reader along a broad historical journey of reading and writing through the ages.

Olson's central concern, as the subtitle of the book suggests, is with the conceptual and cognitive implications of literacy, that is to say the effects of reading and writing on how people think. The goal of the book, he suggests, "is to show how our understanding of the world, that is, our science, and our understanding of ourselves, that is, our psychology, are by-products of our ways of interpreting and creating written texts, of living in a world on paper" (p.19). In order to construct this strong argument for the centrality of literacy in human thought, Olson makes a number of intriguing arguments. Probably most significant here is his insistence that literacy should not be seen as the transcription of speech. Indeed, he is concerned to show that the common view that speech should be seen as primary with respect to writing, should be reversed. Contrary, then, to the standard trope of linguistics that speech has historical, structural, functional and biological priority (see Lyons, 1981), Olson argues that "writing is not transcription of speech but rather provides a model for speech; we introspect language in terms laid down by our scripts" (p.258). Olson here acknowledges his debt to thinkers such as Roy Harris, who has more explicitly taken linguistics to task for its insistence on the priority of spoken language, since this misses "the vital point that although homo loquens is undoubtedly the precursor of homo scribens, the emergence of homo scribens makes a radical and henceforward irreversible difference to what a language is, irrespective of the media employed" (1980, p14).

Olson's argument, then, is that literacy fundamentally changes the way we think, and indeed that awareness of language is a product of literacy, that "writing systems provide the concepts and categories for thinking about the structure of spoken language rather than the reverse. Awareness of linguistic structure is a product of a writing system not a precondition for its development" (p.68). He goes on to argue that because writing gives far fewer clues as to how language is to be understood (speech, by contrast, is accompanied by far more contextual clues), there has been a necessary development of more complex ways of understanding the illocutionary force of texts. Thus, he suggests, it was the development of literacy in England that brought about the increase in words for talking about meaning, an expansion from the old Germanic words - believe, know, mean, say, tell, think, understand - to a vast array of new words and meanings - assert, assume, claim, concede, conclude, confirm, contradict, criticize, and so on.

Despite the breadth and clarity of Olson's argument, however, there is also a problematic narrowness, a concern with a very particular set of ideas and arguments that gets obscured by the breadth of his historical overview. He tends to operate with rather a simple, representational view of language whereby spoken or written language can provide an "unambiguous representation of a speaker's intention" (p.189). Thus, although Olson is interested in how literacy my produce ways of thinking about language and the world, he does not seem interested in how literacy may produce rather than reflect reality. His interest is in the cognitive effects of literacy, not in how literacy is tied up with cultural and political concerns. This limitation leads on to what I see as the major shortcoming of the book. Although at the beginning of the book, Olson addresses not only myths such as writing being nothing but the transcription of speech, but also such myths as literacy having necessary benefits in terms of cultural or economic development, he then fails to take up such issues, and instead dwells primarily on the cognitive and generally decontextualised benefits of literacy.

There seems, therefore, to be a contradictory note in the book. In a concluding discussion of literacy, Olson suggests that to be literate "it is not enough to know the words; one must learn how to participate in the discourse of some textual community" (p.273). He goes on to suggest that "an understanding of the role of reading and writing in a culture, both in the personal lives of individuals and in the diversity of textual communities in which they participate, including participation in the dominant institutions of the society whether legal, scientific, religious or whatever, should allow us to nuance the notion of literacy. Again as a tentative definition, which again serves as an ideal as much as a description, we may think of literacy as both a cognitive and a social condition, the ability to participate actively in a community of readers who have agreed on some principles of reading, a hermeneutics if you will, a set of texts to be treated as significant, and a working agreement on the appropriate or valid interpretation of those texts" (pp. 274-275). Olson seems to be reaching towards a more social definition of literacy, trying hard to link his interests in cognition to social relations. And yet he never quite gets there; he does not pursue the all-important questions about how a "community of readers" comes to agree on some principles of reading, how it is that "a set of texts" comes to be "treated as significant", how it is that "a working agreement on the appropriate or valid interpretation" of texts is arrived at. Olson appears to want to map his cognitive-textual world onto a given social order without questioning how the social context must surely also produce those texts and cognitions.

It might be objected that such criticisms are unfair since Olson is explicitly concerned with the cognitive implications of literacy. But my concern here is that in a book that is so broad and readable, a book that attempts to paint such a large-canvas picture of literacy, it is indeed problematic that such concerns are either ignored or only mentioned in passing. Many of the writers who have looked at the contexts and implications of literacy are given little or no space here: there is no James Gee (e.g. 1991) on literacy and discourse; Rockhill’s key work (e.g. 1987) on women and literacy gets no mention; Heath’s (1983) significant ethnographic study of "literacy events" in community and school is only touched on; Street's arguments (e.g. 1995) for how the uses of literacy may differ fundamentally in different cultural contexts are glossed over; Paulo Freire's (e.g. 1970) key work in critical literacy doesn't warrant a mention; there is no interest in changing literacies or media literacies in a new global context (e.g. Sholle and Denski, 1993). Olson is not interested in the cultural contexts of literacy.

Olson's book is, in fact, something of a rearguard action against the many challenges to the view of literacy and cognition as separated from their social, cultural and political contexts, what Street (1995) calls the "autonomous view of literacy". As Gee (1991) points out, if we move beyond an understanding of literacy as nothing but the encoding and decoding of written language and, rather, start to see literacy as necessarily involving engagement with different discourse systems, different ways of organizing our understandings of the world, literacy becomes something not just linked to cognitive change but to identity and worldview: "If you opt for seeing literacy as a matter of discourse systems, you have opened up a Pandora’s box of social and political concerns. You are dealing with the root of people’s identities, since discourse systems are ultimately about the ways in which people situate themselves in the world" (p.135). Ultimately, while showing an interest in such issues, Olson chooses not to open this Pandora’s box.

To conclude, then, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in literacy broadly conceived. This is a well-written, clear, and interesting book that both summarises major areas of work in literacy and also presents the author’s own view that has been carefully researched and thought through over a long period of time. And yet, I would also recommend that any reader both read this text carefully against the grain, seeking to understand the particularity of Olson’s position, and read this book alongside other books that argue for a more contextualised and politicised view of reading. I would recommend the edited books by Mitchell and Weiler (1991), Lankshear and McLaren (1993) and Cope and Kalantzis (1993) as complementary, if not corrective, texts that broaden the understanding of literacy that Olson sketches out here.

References
Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (Eds) (1993) The powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing. London: The Falmer press.

Gee, J. P. (1991) Discourse systems and aspirin bottles: On literacy. In Mitchell, C. & K. Weiler (Eds) (1991) Rewriting literacy: Culture and the discourse of the Other. Toronto: OISE Press (pp. 123-135).

Heath, S.B. (1983) Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lankshear, C and McLaren, P. (Eds), (1993) Critical literacy: Politics, praxis and the postmodern. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Lyons, J. (1981) Language and linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitchell, C. & K. Weiler (Eds) (1991) Rewriting literacy: Culture and the discourse of the Other. Toronto: OISE Press.

Rockhill, K. (1987) Gender, language and the politics of literacy. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 8(2), 153-167.

Sholle, D. & S. Denski (1993). Reading and writing the media: Critical media literacy and postmodernism. In Lankshear, C and McLaren, P. (Eds), Critical literacy: Politics, praxis and the postmodern. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, (pp. 297-322).

Street, B. (1995) Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. London: Longman.

[Use of this text is by kind permission of the author and the University of Melbourne Linguistics Department]