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Writing Now: New Developments in Mass Literacy
A Public Lecture by Deborah Brandt
Thursday, May 3, 4:00-5:30 pm
0264 MacQuigg Lab
Sponsored by the Literacy Studies Working Group, with the support of the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, the College of Humanities, the Department of English, and the Arts and Science Colleges at The Ohio State University
Everyone knows that reading is good for you. Reading is considered the road to self-improvement, civic competence, upward mobility, not to mention pleasure and critical consciousness. But what about writing? In the history of mass literacy, writing enjoys far less prestige than reading and no clear status as a site of character formation or social good. Indeed, the value of writing has resided mostly in the reading of it, not the doing of it. Writing gains prestige for what it does for readers, not for writers. In this presentation, Brandt ruminates on the value of writing, where it can be found, and why those locations make writing so culturally different from reading. Brandt will also consider the implications of these differences as Americans in the 21st century spend less time reading and more time writing.
Deborah Brandt is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches undergraduate writing and graduate courses in literacy and contemporary writing studies. She is author of two award winning books, Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers and Texts (1990) and Literacy in American Lives (2001). In 2003 she won the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award in Education, which brings attention to scholarly and artistic works that make important ideas accessible to audiences beyond the academy.
