15
Why Literacy Matters, Then and Now
David R. Olson
I read myself in quotation marks.
—Todorov
Few events in the evolution of modern culture rival the importance of
writing and a written tradition. Yet just how and why writing and literacy
play a supportive if not a controlling role in this evolution remain obscure.
That literacywas a defining feature of social life in ancient Greece and Rome
is elaborated in all of the chapters of this volume. Indeed, four themes stand
out in their importance for reconstructing our understanding of literacy
both then and now. The first is the common focus on literacy as a topic,
that is, on the implications of writing and a written tradition; not only to
trace the evolution of a tradition but to show how the evolution of that
tradition was influenced by writing and the availability of written records.
A second theme is that of addressing literacy as a social practice, that is,
addressing the uses of literacy rather than the simple fact of literacy.
Whereas a conspicuous weakness of earlier theories of literacy and culture
was the implicit assumption that if only a society had writing all else
would fall into place, an important acknowledgment in current theories of
literacy is that literacy may have important effects if and only if it is found
to serve a valued function (Doronila 2001; Thomas, ch. 2, this volume).
Indeed, literacy is ‘‘a social condition which can be defined only in terms
of readership’’ (Havelock 1982, 57).
The third theme reflects the view that it is no longer in question as to
whether or not literacy plays a role in social and cognitive change but rather
just how it is that writing and literacy can serve to bring about such change.
Conspicuous in many of the chapters in this volume that discuss literacy in
ancient Greece and Rome is the reliance on quotation, whether from
memory or from a document, in classical discourse. The very nature of
quotation, I shall argue presently, gives the discourse surprising and import-
ant characteristics and may help to explain some of the legacies of literacy.
And the fourth, less developed than the other three, is the focus on
readers and what they made of the documents they had access to. Who