A theory of reading/writing: from
literacy to literature
David R. Olson
OISE, University of Toronto
Abstract
Correspondence:
David R. Olson, OISE,
University of Toronto,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
E-mail:
[email protected]
This 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 theory 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 at
least some of these lines of research and theory in
terms of a ‘theory of reading/writing’.
Some attempts at, if not integration, at least cooperation, amongst these various lines of research and
theory appear in the interdisciplinary handbooks that
have appeared recently (Wagner et 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 exclusive study of the basic skills of reading and writing
to include the study of literature as a formative factor 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 interpretation. 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 mastering the ways that scripts are employed in the creation
of the diverse forms of extended texts we think of as
literature 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 commonly
distinguishes 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 world’s writing systems,
Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009. © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press.
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D. R. Olson
on this view, are representations of the spoken form
of language and for this reason are categorically different 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 properties of speech captured by the visual signs differ from
language to language. Some writing systems represent 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, writing 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 routinely 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 representing the ‘known’; rather, one is learning to think
about one’s speech in terms of the constituent structure of the writing system. All writing systems tend
to preserve morphemes,1 roughly words, and consequently morphemic signs are the easiest to learn while
at the same time providing a distinctive concept and
an enhanced awareness of single morphemes. Syllabaries, representing syllables, enhance an awareness
of single syllables; abjads, the awareness of single
consonants. Only alphabets further analyze syllables into distinguishable phonemes with the consequence that readers of alphabets develop concepts
of 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 language into consciousness (Vygotsky, 1962; Harris,
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1986, 1989, 2009; Olson, 1994).2 In speaking, one’s
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 various levels of consciousness of language that writing
systems make available for the thinker to exploit
for 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 representation, 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 sentence, a paragraph, an essay, a legal contract are all
properties of writing systems with particular sets of
conventions for their appropriate use, the mastery of
which helps to explain the somewhat diverse cognitive implications of literacy.
Speech and writing rely on the same basic linguistic 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 production and comprehension of verbal expressions
depend importantly on whether they are spoken or
written (Chafe, 1985). Writing provides opportunities for re-writing in the design of documents suited
to the anticipated specialized contexts of comprehension and a written text provides opportunities for
re-reading, unlikely if not impossible in oral contexts. 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 discourse, whether holding a conversation or teaching
a class, is little affected by purpose or genre. Spoken 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 specialized contexts of comprehension’ (see above).
A theory of reading/writing
Biber’s analysis confirms the more general view that
oral language tends to be ‘paratactic’ rather than
‘hypotactic’, employing more coordinative ‘and
then’s 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 reading, 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 outgrowth of oral law, written texts are generally elaborations of spoken ones. ‘He did it!’ yields criminal law;
‘That’s mine’ yields property law; ‘I’ll 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 in
a writing system, ranging from punctuation to pagination, reflect properties and structures that are implicit
in speech. Through re-reading and re-writing, written texts can mark out these implicit features without
introducing radically new functions.
The relations between speaking and writing
can work in either direction. Linguistic structures 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 ‘Miss
Fiditch’, Martin Joos’s (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 phonological awareness, important to literacy, is taught
orally.
Specialized uses of writing are the result of adapting 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 linguistic form. The genre, like the script itself, therefore,
recruits a particular form of linguistic awareness or
consciousness of language. In both speech and writing, structure is adjusted to function, but in writing
this adjustment can be carried out on a far grander
scale because of writing’s 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 work
in the Western intellectual tradition
Becoming conscious of many important aspects of
linguistic form, by hypothesis an effect of literacy, is
different 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 we
do not know explicitly or metalinguistically the rule
informing our decision.3 Some metalinguistic knowledge, 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 historical process, with different properties discovered at
different times in different cultures and used for particular purposes largely as a part of a written tradition (Havelock, 1982). Once learned, as mentioned,
this consciousness is applicable to oral speech as
well as to one’s writing. Thus, phonological awareness 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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D. R. Olson
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 has
been 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 concept 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’ of
a 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-known
syntagmatic–paradigmatic 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 children’s
natural tendency to re-represent their knowledge
more abstractly, thereby producing abstract concepts
such as word and sentence. Halverson asks ‘Are we
to suppose that no one before Socrates ever asked
the meaning of a word?’ This question, in my view,
confuses a speaker’s knowledge of the language
with knowledge about the language. It is a question 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.
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Only the latter is, by hypothesis, linked to the dictionary 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 new
attitude 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 Fronto’s friends interjects a comment
that, as it happens, contains the expression,
praeterpropter, ‘more or less’. Fronto stops
all 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 knowledge and further argued that ‘The medium of communication … 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).
A theory of reading/writing
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 translated 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 for
inference, Leezenberg (2001) has shown that Aristotle 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 meanings, then, are not the start of the life of the language,
but rather the end product of a long social and historical process … Literal meanings depend on the
stabilization and codification of linguistic norms;
these are achieved with the aid of literacy, education, standardization of language and lexicography’
(p. 302). Rather than taking consciousness of language 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 different historical periods, an awareness that has given
rise to the study of the ‘history of reading’ associating 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 classic
The 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
letter’s 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 seeking 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 reformers, 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 revolutionary moves were to insist that religious authority 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 Scripture. 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 verbal, 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 writing being used rather to train and enhance memory
(Small, 1997, p. 8). It was only during the renaissance and in the hands of the humanists, and especially 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 looking at language, namely its literal meaning, into consciousness 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). This
scrupulous attention to the very words, a historical
product of literacy, is essential to what some psychologists have labeled ‘rationality’ (Kahneman and
Tversky, 1996; Stanovich, 1999, 2009). Such rationality may be better labeled as ‘textual rationality’,
rationality that is shaped to work with literal meanings of de-contextualized texts within a documentary
Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009
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D. R. Olson
tradition (Smith and Schryer, 2009). Highly literate 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 words
is 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 Protestantism and the rise of Early Modern Science, but
recent 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 meaning 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 hermeneutics, their way of reading, took the Scripture as fixed
in the sense that anyone reading it for oneself would
encounter exactly the same replicable, observable
text. Indeed, a distinguishing feature of renaissance
humanism, generally, was its devotion to determining 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 meaning derived from a careful reading of the words in
their context rather than requiring interpretation by
the reader; texts, as they assumed, literally meant
what they said. Interpretation became a perjorative
term. Third, the meanings so delivered were available to the ordinary reader and dependent on neither outside authority nor hidden presuppositions.
All of these ran counter to the prevailing attitude to
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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 the
fixity 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 Cassiano’s observations and precise drawings of species of plants and
animals (Freedberg, 2002), Galileo’s visual evidence
for the moons of Jupiter, Robert Hooke’s observations with a microscope, and Robert Boyle’s experiments 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, that
observed 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, influenced 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 seventeenth century. Alpers shows that not only were
participants well known to each other, but also the
A theory of reading/writing
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 were
leading exponents, for emphasizing beauty over
truth in art, and he ‘chides those who read meanings
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 conventions—fixity 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 modern
scientific communities and Dutch schools of art. The
new way of reading succeeded by bringing into consciousness a particular set of properties of language
while setting aside others in the interest of advancing 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 carrying 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, expressing propositions that ‘stand in’ for objects and their
logical relations. Commentary, paraphrase, and construal become central literary forms in this tradition.
Regarding the third phase, Frye identified it as the
descriptive phase of language, concerned primarily 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 without writing. Indeed, Havelock (1982) argued that
the writing down of the orally composed and performed Homeric epics was the major turning point in
Western cultural evolution, leading to Frye’s second 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, and
left 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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D. R. Olson
range them right without any such perplexing
repetitions (pp. 264–5).
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. But
again, the claims for literacy are based on metalinguistic or reflexive awareness of the form of
argument and its use as a distinctive mode of discourse, and here the claims for literacy seem more
firmly established. Discursive, logical prose, it may
be argued, is an historical achievement dependent
upon literacy.
Frye’s third stage relies on a conscious distinction between literal and other forms of meaning, the
evolution of which we associated earlier with Protestantism and early modern science.
To Frye’s 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 in Mansfield Park writes:
‘It must have the strangest appearance!’ The exclamation mark indicates that the strangeness is apparent 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 Woolf’s
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 of
the character’s minds (Olson and Oatley, manuscript
in preparation).
2.1 How writing works its magic
I have argued that writing and reading in the West
are cultural practices that have evolved through
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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 artifact, an object that endures through time and across
space. Second, this artifact represents and makes
available for analysis and specialization, aspects of
linguistic form appropriate to particular communicative 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 of
logical 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 to
fit 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 writer’s 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 form—sound for poetry,
precise word meaning, and logical form for explanatory 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 textbook—the word, the
clause, the sentence, the genre, etc.
A theory of reading/writing
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 Nobelprize winning physicist Richard Feynman and
the historian of science Charles Weiner. Weiner
had come upon some of Feynman’s original
notes that he characterized as Feynman’s ‘record
of day-to-day work’. Feynman contested the
description saying ‘I actually did the work on the
paper … It’s not a record, not really. It’s 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 feature 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’ of
the utterance as captured by a particular writing
system—a 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 differently 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 encountering 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 this
indirect route, but only in writing does this expression 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 linguistic 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 unchanging 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 the
very resources that allow reading to have a history
and have made writing and reading primary influences in the shaping of the modern world.
Reading and writing operate on quoted expressions. Operating on a written expression differs from
the way one operates on or processes a direct utterance, 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 John’s belief. But if John
says ‘James Thurber said “There’s 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 as
a 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… one’s own words then first
designate words of the other speaker, and
only the latter have their usual reference. …
In reported speech one talks about the sense,
e.g., of another person’s 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. 58–9]… 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 theory
of speech acts (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and
exploited in written composition which ‘frees language 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 from
the utterer or writer and from its usual reference.
Conceptual thought is entertaining some content
without either asserting or denying it, but then turning it to one’s own use in our own interpretation.
Reading and writing are actions on those quoted
expressions that turn them back into intended meanings, what Oatley and Djikic (2008) have described
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as running simulations. Different ways of structuring
these quoted expressions and different ways of interpreting 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 language upon itself, that is, a reflexive use of language. 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 narrator comment on the choice of words, a metalinguistic 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 meaning 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/writing
in the Western tradition
All the ways of using and understanding language
are available in ordinary spoken discourse. Metaphor
and simile are common in all speech, any expression may be quoted and commented on, statements
may be judged true or false, assertions agreed or disagreed with, and intentions and feelings discussed.
Ways of writing and reading exploit these linguistic 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 purposes. The result is literature with its diverse ways
of reading and its models of rationality. We may
summarize them briefly.
A theory of reading/writing
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 monological, from one producer, and that they all involve displaced 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 primary 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
Frye’s second way of writing expresses and invites
a second way of reading. It adopts all the properties of the first way, namely, the distinction between
quoted meaning and reality, but it adds a new property, the systematic attention to the lexical and logical 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 magisterial levels in the hands of thinkers such as Aquinas.
This way of reading requires that one pay scrupulous
attention to wording, assumptions, and to the truthpreserving 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 writing continuous discourse. These include rules for
picking out observables and a strictly literal set of
descriptions. The literal meanings taken as central to
Protestant 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 subjective 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 exploration of shared subjectivities between writers and
readers. 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 subjectivity, 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.
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Notes
1 Daniels (2009) has shown that the three known
independently invented ancient writing systems, the
Sumerian, the Chinese, and the Mayan, shared the same
basic structure: most of their morphemes were just
a single syllable and could be represented by a single
visual sign.
2 Harris (2009) goes further to claim that writing systems essentially ‘misrepresent’ that structure. He shows
how a ‘scriptist’ bias has distorted the understanding of
language from Plato to the present.
3 This example is from Pinker (2008).
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4 Word awareness may have been facilitated by the
insertion of spaces between words (Saenger, 1982).
5 This is not to imply that there is such a thing as the
meaning of a word or the literal meaning of a sentence.
There are, however, conventions honored by the textual
community and dictionary makers, and entrenched by
the school.
6 Apologies to non-North American readers who may not
know that a nickel is five cents and a quarter is twentyfive cents. The item comes from M. Rokeach’s (1960)
studies of dogmatism, which, he suggested measured an
aspect of intelligence. K. Stanovich (2009) suggests the
items are better described as tests of rationality.
7 These relations are somewhat more complex than
indicated in that some writing communicates directly to
a reader just as, on the other hand, speaking can freeze
an expression by quoting it.
8 Further, I have identified quoted meaning with linguistic
meaning and with literal meaning, all of which require
more detailed examination.