It is important to note . . .
that Abram's analysis, as useful as it is in helping us explore some of the implications of our uses of literacy for how we understand ourselves in relation to the physical world, is in its own way as deterministic as McLuhan's or Ong's have been shown to be (by scholars like Deborah Brandt, for example). Randall Roorda (2001) offers an insightful overview of this and other problems in Abram's analyses of literacy, especially Abram's failure to account for cross-cultural research that leads to far more tempered claims about literacy's effects than Abram makes (see especially Roorda, pp. 104-105). Yet while Roorda takes Abram and other "environmentally oriented commentators" (100) to task for these problems, he does not dismiss the general notion promoted by such writers that literacy as a technology differs in important ways from speech and may thus have significant implications for how humans understand themselves--that, as he puts it, "writing may bear different relation to its context than speaking does" (110). In drawing on Abram, I am not proposing that literacy is, as Rooda sums up Abram's central claim, "the primary instrument of people's separation from place" (103); indeed, my analysis of the promotion surrounding the publication of Harry Potter and the Ring of Fire should make clear that I see the connections among literacy, technology, and subjectivity to be far more complex than that. Rather, I see value in Abram's insistence that human experience is at some level inevitably physical and that our Western sense of self devalues that physicality. As Rooda puts it, the closer we look at language and literacy, the more we may come to feel that "the realm of letters, even more than of language in general, is finally a narrow swath within the entirety of not-only-human experience" (113).