ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the hope that literacy might come to function primarily as a life-enhancing enabler of action rather than simply as a form of cultural capital, a mark of social distinction. It focuses on a short story that offers two intertwined and gender-specific literacy narratives. West's "The Typewriter" offers an exemplary narrative for just such a reading, a reading that will focus on particular performances of gendered emotions that both perpetuate and complicate the literacy myth and the capitalist labor process supporting it. She is rewarded for her gendered performance, but must subordinate herself to a masculinized and racialized corporate space and witness her father's demise. Royster's definition moves literacy away from the literacy myth and traditional ways of feeling literate, to emphasize instead literacy's very real potential for social change.
