ABSTRACT
An interesting aspect of the debate on literacy is the nature of the relationship between human ideas and the technology of writing. It is a part of a broader discussion about the relationship of human subjectivity and material objects that originated with the rise of consumer culture and that literature often thematized. Objects, as contemporary critics observe, do not necessarily remain in antithetical relations to humans but partake in their nature. Marshall McLuhan in his Gutenberg Galaxy points out that diverse technologies are nothing but the extensions of senses (1962, 4) while Julie Park demonstrates in The Self and It that the tools that people employ to increase their capacities become for them instruments of the expression of their selves (2010, xiii). Objects connected with writing and print technology are particularly well suited for this expressive function since their chief role is the preservation of human thoughts and ideas. As Deidre Shauna Lynch observes, the conflation of identity and writing is even manifest in the polysemy of the word ‘character,’ which signifies both human identity and a sign in the text (1998, 30). In his 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke points to this relation between personality, ideas, and typography by describing cognition as an act of inscribing or imprinting where mind is likened to paper and ideas to characters (Lynch 1998, 34). Human senses, thoughts, and cognition are thus associated with writing materials that partake in human consciousness.
