Harvey Graff has argued convincingly that faith in the grand promises of literacy has.

Harvey Graff has argued convincingly that faith in the grand promises of literacy has, more frequently than not, gone unrewarded. The nineteenth hundred years he contends, provided a fertile climate for educators in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as Horace Mann to promulgate the belief that literacy inevitably leads to financial and social succes Literacy's failure to satisfy these expectations, Graff points not at home is one of the social and cultural contradictions not away "in the developing social relationships that make up the quintessence of history and sociology." Stating a central point of his revisionist understanding of the history of literacy, Graff marks that "the clearest lesson of the nineteenth hundred years as the 'origins of our confess time' constitutes much of what I think a 'literacy myth.'" This myth involves a pattern of contradictions which he points to saying, "We may simply reiterate the role of post-Enlightenment ideologies and clusters of social deliberation and theory in providing the grounding for greatest in number of our current notions about literacy, and stres that many, however not all, of the facts of unravelling contradict those assumptions and theories" (Legacies 265)

Graff also relies forward the concept of continuity in order to interpret the history of literacy. To focus in succession historical continuities, Graff maintains, means eschewing an exaggerated emphasis forward change, and rejecting persistent cultural dichotomies.

Slave narratives exhibit many of the cultural contradictions and continuities current in the social relationships of nineteenth-century America. When we consider closely and examine the character literacy played in these slaves' lives, patterns of continuity and contradiction benefit as analytic and interpretive conceptions which help us to reinterpret these parts and better understand the slave's relation to the ruling agriculture of nineteenth-century America. Much of what is revealed in these narratives is the way in which literacy enabled and empowered blacks to gain freedom from, and superintend over, the ruling culture that enslaved them. The narratives also, however, reveal the ways in which literacy, as a tool of white hegemony, sought to restrain and dominate illiterate blacks. This contrast marks single of the contradictory ways in which literacy unraveled among slaves. To emphasize continuity, forward the other hand, we must eschew the literacy / orality dichotomy and expect at black culture's historical legacy of literacy--conceived as a holistic development--as another way that literacy unraveled among blacks in the nineteenth century

Graff's interpretive terminology in The Legacies of Literacy advises a framework for examining the character of literacy in American slave narratives. Too frequently readers conceive literacy in these narratives as an emancipating skill which leverages the slave without of bondage and into freedom. When critics conceive literacy in more involved ways, it is frequently problematized through attendant poststructuralist conundra which pit language, and hence the proces of acquiring literacy, against the narrator's "being" or "authentic self" Or, following the lead of Henry Louis Gates, literacy is conceived as mastery of a method of self-referential signs which, as Houston Baker explains, "imply an ideal critic whose readings would bid knowledge only from the literary a whole of Afro-America. The semantics endorsed by way of his ideal critic would not be those of a civilization They would be the specially consecrated meanings of an intertextual world of 'written art'" (Blue 103)

Frederick Douglass's antebellum autobiographies have been the focal point of novel debates over the significance of the acquisition of literacy for slaves. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) exhibit, in an exemplary way, a protracted tradition of slave autobiography that continually sought novel ways to mediate the relation between writer and reader. This mediation, however complexly conceived, has elicited from several scholars a discussion that frequently turns on contemporary theories of language which decenter the speaking control and suspend "autonomous discourse" alone above nitty-gritty pragmatic social interaction. as it is assumptions about language are, in part, the make submissive of this paper. My admit assumptions follow the lead of John Searle's speech-act theory which emphasizes the interactive, pragmatic character of discourse.(1)

It must be kept in mind, however, that our understanding of the psychological and social general intents of literacy hinge on our theories about literacy. Deborah Brandt's Literacy as Involvement describes in what way prevailing "strong-text" characterizations of literacy "derive from a view of literate language as decontextualized and self-referential. Inscribed language is said [by strong-text theory] to rise clear of an embeddedness in an immediate time, place, and voice, thereby objectifying fancy and language and heightening consciousness of the two in a way that permits the reorganization of both" (3) offer more simply, "strong-text" characterizations of language emphasize the isolating, technological, and non-orallike aspects of language. Above all, strong-text thinking about literacy emphasizes the social-antisocial dichotomy, usually paired with orality and literacy, respectively. Literacy, as this prevailing view has it, takes the young working-class scholarship scholar and permanently changes the way she exists in the world, alienating her from her aged community and engaging her in a textual world that distances her from her former self and community. This social-antisocial tension is seen nmost clearly in discussions of academy literacy success and failure. Brandt describes the situation like this: