ABSTRACT
The word “literacy” never seems to stand still. It makes its appearance in the discourses of history as well as those of comparative linguistics. It shows up in debates about economics and literature. It mediates interdisciplinary conversations among scholars from history, sociology, anthropology, political science, linguistics, education, literature (Keller-Cohen, 1994). It also participates in public debates about schooling, employment, and public values, It is one of the ways in which we now talk about the visual arts and new electronic media, As it appears in these areas, it assumes different guises and enacts different purposes. The diverse array of meanings and connotations for literacy that we see today provide perverse evidence for Humpty Dumpty’s view that a word can mean “just what [we] choose it to mean— neither more nor less.”
