ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on literacy, specifically from the perspective of curriculum inquiry. Gunther Kress has subsequently worked within that broad tradition, richly embellishing it, and it is his formulation of literacy that he wants to highlight. An important reference point in The Insistence of the Letterin is what author described as the modernism-postmodernism debate. As Keith Hoskin's writes, Jacques Derrida has produced the most memorable philosophical reflection of our time concerning writing's problematic power and status. The chapter seeks to rearticulate it as a parable about literacy, explicitly within the framework of New Literacy Studies. Proposing a new regard for how the invisible technologies of learning construct a new power of and for writing, the author suggests that the grammatocentric world is to be seen as the ultimate form, so far, of logocentric culture. C. Collin and R. K. Blot provide a striking account of the history and ethnography of literacy understood as a sociocultural practice.
