ENG 677
Reading Response# 2
February 1, 2010
Space—another rhetoric component
The seventy-two-year-old John Falcone says, “everybody here was poor. We didn’t have money so we believed everybody was the same way. Because we never got out of the neighborhood, we were close..” (Mutnick 636).This poor man believed everybody was poor not because he knew about the outside areas but because his place consoled and sheltered him. That could be applied to everyone lives anywhere. When someone suffers from the difficulty of life—say, poverty --and he or she sees everybody has the same troublesome experiences, that person would accept his or her situation and lives happily. So thanks to place! Thanks to place because it sheltered that poor man and helped us to examine the relationship between that man and his place.
The project of “Our Legacies” points out many significant ideas regarding the space/ place, and its relation to the accommodators. It works as an imaginary bridge between the past and the present. Each place is full of happy and sad memories, significant and insignificant stories to tell, and crucial truths that may change the whole world, or at least to change our look towards who lived there.
Oral History, then, comes to hit the heart of the reality. Oral history is not racist because there is no writer that we may need to question his or her ethical values. However, the speakers are neutral people who just tell the truth (or at least at their best). By oral history, many myths may disappear as they may never exist. We live now in the present and we do not see many myths happen nowadays, so why they only have been associated with the past? I wonder, if we listened to those people who lived in the past where the myths have been told, would we still have myths to listen to? In sum, when somebody speaks up, we know his or her language, ethnicity, identity, etc, and therefore, we can use that knowledge as a strong rhetoric component to learn about literacy, pedagogy, etc.
Literacy in American Lives gives us a beautiful journey into the past. It highlights the development of literacy and the factors that affected literacy, especially the change of economy. It is quite obvious that the change of economy brings a severe change to the whole society; however, as this book tries to say, not only economy does that, but literacy also narrows and widens the gaps among the society members. Moreover, it is interesting to see how people were literate and educated in the past when there were no internet, TV, and Kindle. In the first chapter, the author focuses on the changes witnessed by people, Day and Hunt. Again, for me this sort of search gives more credibility because it was based on “real” people’s experiences and narrations. The same could be applied to the work of Woven the Words. “Let us tell our own story,” stated by the director of the museum, goes a long with the main theme of history research. It “evokes” people to produce what they know about the past; therefore it helps us to reach a very advanced, yet authentic, level of understanding people and their literacy, life, etc.
I think I really like the story of Day and Hunt in the sense that these two women experienced literary differently even though they were both brought up on the farms. They had differently challenges with literacy as economic change began to pressure them. They discovered that the more educated you are, the more money you make. I love real life situation and experience. But worthy of note is the issue of inequality in literacy. This means that women's level of literacy acquisition was slower compared to the men. Not only that, the availability of literacy also depends on the regions. In other words, some regions had more opportunity than others, and that meant those who were among the favored regions if you like, had more exposure to literacy as opposed to the other.
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