The New Literacy Studies and the Resurgent Literacy Myth

ANNOTATION: Graff, H.J. (2022). The New Literacy Studies and the Resurgent Literacy Myth. In: Searching for Literacy: The Social and Intellectual Origins of Literacy Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96981-3_9

Graff’s chapter in Palgrave Macmillan’s 2022 release Searching for Literacy is a blazing takedown of New Literacy Studies, claiming that much of the research in this area never defines what it means by the term, lacks the evidence of empirical or theoretical studies, and totally disregards the significant research and seminal works in the field, ignoring the rich history of thinking that had its roots in the educational reform movement of the 1960s. Worse, in many cases, the concept of “multiple” literacies today is loosely and baselessly thrown around by corporate interests as a way to sell educational and other types of products.

Graff’s “literacy myth” takes aim at the “unique and innate power of ‘literacy by itself.’” His position is that new writers in the “new literacy” rarely define what they mean by the term “literacy.” It is, he writes, a problematic term in that there is no freestanding entity called “literacy,” and that “literacy”—and indeed education aimed at producing it—can never be free of context. Literacy is inextricably tied to a value system and to the complex web of conditions associated with a sense of advancement, superiority, and progress or “success,” all of which are culturally and/or socially determined by those with the power to define them. The “myth” he refers to is the belief that “the acquisition of literacy is a precursor to and inevitably results in economic development, democratic practice, cognitive enhancement, and upward social mobility.” The use of the term “myth” is not to suggest that literacy does not lead to advancement (it can, in many but not all cases). The “myth” refers to the concept of literacy itself as autonomous. Rather, it is contextual and ideological.

Graff’s definition of literacy rests on the foundations of reading, writing, and sometimes arithmetic. In contrast, the new literacies refer to skills in many and multiple domains. He lists 36 types of literacies found in a simple online search—from reading and writing to data, multimodal, media, civic and ethical, financial, health and medical, and many more. It is problematic, he writes, that the different literacies are rarely compared, interrelated, or evaluated. A sense of chaos results, blurring the lines between “scholarship and education on the one hand, and promotion and sales, on the other.”

The reader is left to ponder the difference between lower-case literacy (a general term used to describe the possession of a specific set of knowledge and skills) and uppercase Literacy, Graff’s “foundational reading, writing, and in some cases arithmetic” definition. Graff’s is a tightly written chapter that makes a great deal of sense, though the reader (at least this reader) is also left to wonder how much of his position is flavored by sour grapes: His own book, The Literacy Myth (1979), was never cited in the 2020 Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies.

He likes this new Palgrave MacMillan book so much better.