Joe Amato: "Family Values: Literacy, Technology, and Uncle Sam" (20)
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"Articulation is, then, not just a thing
(nor just connections) but a process of creating connections, much in
the same way that the hegemony is not domination but the process of
creating and maintaining consensus or of co-ordinating
interests." (Slack 114)
quoted in Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola, 368 |
In Chapter 20, Joe Amato practices the process of "articulation" Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola describe in the second part of Chapter 19, revealing for us this process of "making connections" as he reviews his life story--his Uncle Sam the ex-con and his "sad, rehabilitated eyes," his French mother-turned-receptionist, his father who "My brother and I had supported . . . since 1981" (376). Amato reflects, later, that "I didn't get the connection till years later" (369).
This chapter beautifully, painfully, illustrates the fiction (and danger) of the Myth of Literacy. Amato's father was literate, but he could not fill out his welfare forms.
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"When I think of literacy, my father comes immediately to mind: excellent speaking skills, solid writing skills, and yet a curious lapse in seeing himself in any but an individualistic context." (380) "He knew how to read, and he knew how to write--he possessed those skills. But he had a helluva time understanding his own social predicament. Like so many first generation Americans of his era, he simply could not grasp what had happened 'to' him, he could not (as we say in the biz) theorize his own subject position, his place within the social fabric." (380) |
From the autobiographical account this narrative provides, it becomes quite apparent that literacy does not offer an automatic passport to success. Amato himself is supremely literate, yet he himself is without the material benefits the Myth of Literacy promised him. He is a 41-year-old, highly educated Assistant Professor who has "just been denied tenure" (375), a poet who also teaches technical writing and was, in his previous life, an engineer. Amato and his new wife, another English studies professor whom he met online, are struggling from paycheck to paycheck, worrying about where they might rebuild their lives so that the material conditions are not so difficult and invasive. Amato is quite able to "theorize his own subject position, his place within the social fabric" (380), yet it seems that he has been marginalized in some traditional ways anyway. The Myth of Literacy is most certainly a fiction.
Yet despite the lack of material rewards Amato has been able to acquire as a result of his version of literacy, the literacy that Amato embodies is the literacy I want my students to embody, the literacy that I myself struggle every day to embody. This is the literacy I think that the contributors in this volume hope to embody (or already embody). This is the literacy to which 21st century technologies have driven us.
| "The 'literacy' as I would like to see the term employed would denote not simply the static (by-) products of cognitive or creative faculties, but an active critical engagement with complex values and feelings." (379) |
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Contents |
