ABSTRACT
The best-known literacy narratives are either autobiographies, like Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary , or novels, plays, and films “that foreground issues of language acquisition and literacy” (Eldred and Mortensen 513) and that are as diverse as a Hawthorne short story, The Color Purple, and Educating Rita. But literacy narratives are also told in ordinary people’s conversations about their daily lives, as recorded, for instance, in Lorri Neilsen’s ethnographic study Literacy and Living, and in the classroom talk and writing of students. I want to focus upon how various literacy narratives portray passages between language worlds in order to consider the relevance of such passages to a writing pedagogy, particularly to a pedagogy for basic writing classes.
