Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics

by John Trimbur

From the work of medieval spiritualist Margery Kempe and John Foxes’ Book of Martyrs to nineteenth century American scrapbooks, Mexican ex-votos, and Italian-American cookbooks, the essays in Popular Literacy examine acts of reading, writing, and speaking that take place at the margins of official, institutionalized literacy. The contributors explore these noncanonical, unschooled, and unauthorized acts in order to explore how people make literacy popular by using whatever means of communication is at hand, to their own ends. The essays treat a range of topics, agents, and historical settings, and the contributors use a variety of theoretical frameworks and methods from a number of ethnography, American studies, history, literary criticism, science studies, rhetoric, and writing studies. The chapters examine particularly revealing historical moments and cultural conjunctures where instances of popular literacy take place in uneasy relation to the dominant institutions—the church, the state, the schools, the market. The contributors show that while the practices of popular literacy are never free from these influences, neither are they altogether encapsulated by them. Taken as a whole, the essays are loosely aligned in a common project to study the ways ordinary (and extraordinary) readers, speakers, and writers use literacy to articulate identities and social aspirations, to produce alternative forms of cultural knowledge, and to cope with the asymmetries of power that regulate cultural life.

320 pages, Paperback

First published May 17, 2001

About the author

John Trimbur is a specialist in composition and writing studies, with interests in cultural studies of literacy and the politics of language in the United States and South Africa. He has published widely on writing theory and has won a number of awards, including the Richard Braddock Award for Outstanding Article (2003) for "English Only and U.S. College Composition," the James L. Kinneavy Award (2001) for "Agency and the Death of the Author: A Partial Defense of Modernism," and the College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award (1993) for The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary.

He has also published a collection of essays Service or Solidarity: Composition and the Problem of Expertise (2011) and three textbooks The Call to Write (6th ed. 2013), Reading Culture (8th ed. 2012), and A Short Guide to Writing About Chemistry (2nd ed. 2000) and edited the collection Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics (2001). In July and Auguest 2012, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.