ABSTRACT
Relying on recent developments in new literacy studies, I explore the concept of the continuum illiterate-literate and argue that it implies elements of transformation, as well as conservation. I also argue that three intersecting continua must be considered together: the continua oralwritten, rural-urban, and restricted-full literacy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, I show how elements of restricted literacy are still present on the threshold of the twenty-first century; how they entertain relation with rural to urban migration and with a marked contrast between different ethnicities; and in what sense this fact may be visible in the everyday use of language. My initial project was entitled “From Speech Acts to Literate Practices” and I intended to understand the interface between the written and the oral on the basis of the conceptions developed by Voloshinov (1973) and by Bakhtin (1981, 1986) concerning speech acts and discourse genres. Two years ago, I was not yet aware of the fact that oral and written languages consist of overlapping realities, which are impossible to understand as separate unities. In this sense, I still defended the idea of a continuum of discourse genres which would range from oral to written language or from informal to formal registers in a somewhat separate fashion. That is the way I imagined a transition from speech acts to literate practices when I first started to visit a community on the outskirts of São Carlos, a city of about 220,000 inhabitants in the southeast of Brazil, 95 percent of whom reside in the city and only 5 percent in the rural area. As I began to collect field data, I continued to study, together with the group of students I supervised, Bakhtin and Voloshinov’s theory, and to improve my understanding of the sociohistorical approach from Fairclough’s tridimensional proposal (1992, 1995, 2003). Some important
insights were given by Certeau (1980), and by Bortoni-Ricardo (1985) and Goffman (1959), as I gradually enlarged my understanding of language in general and started to envisage it more and more as a part of culture and ethics.
