What is Literacy Criticism?
What does it mean to engage in literacy criticism based in literacy theory?
How does it compare to how other people discuss "literacy" with reference to literature?
Cultural literacy
Media literacy
-or- popular books as simply promoting literacy by getting kids to read
Analyzing a novel in terms of literacy theory is not simply putting it in the service of literacy education. It is using it to identify what our ideas of literacy and literacy education really are--to examining our assumptions, and considering what we gain--and lose--by achieving a certain level of literacy, and what we maintain--or miss--by failing to achieve that level. It takes literacy off of its pedestal, though this is perhaps to put it on a different pedestal. It rolls our theoretical idea of literacy through the mud, beats it up, dusts it off, and sees what is left, often in order to compare it to how we are currently living our lives with literacy as a part of our personal, political, and social existence.
Wellinghall: Treebeard's Sanctuary as Locus Amoenus
This is the first of the Ent posts I have in mind. One of the reasons The Two Towers is my favorite of the three books of Lord of the Rings is because of the Ents. The Ents show us what is worth "getting roused" for--what is worth fighting and dying for. And that is what was missing from the Peter Jackson film, which was all devastation and ugliness. While Fangorn forest is not a locus amoenus--it is tense, and stuffy, rather like a version of the Old Forest that borders the Shire, but with righteous indignation instead of corruption and malice--the Ents, and particularly Treebeard, as the oldest Ent, are very closely associated with beautiful, sacred sanctuary spaces in Middle Earth. And we are shown those places along with Merry and Pippin.
It was in fact with reference to Wellinghall--Treebeard's closest Ent House--that I first thought of the locus amoenus as central to Lord of the Rings.
Drums: Not so Romantic in Real Life
If Voyager concerned itself to a large degree with the literary, Drums of Autumn takes great pains to separate the reality from the fantasy, or to infuse real life into what still remains a time travel fantasy--and more so with the appearance of Bree and Roger from the 1960s. The overwhelming example of this is the emphasis on birth control. However, the attentive reader will also find a retroactive commentary on the romance novel motif that runs throughout Voyager in the person, and actions, of Stephen Bonnet.
"The formidable Bonnet with a love token? Could be, Roger supposed; some women might find the Captain’s air of subdued violence attractive."
What is a Good Book?
It might be a fetish, or a talisman, or a touchstone.
Books that have merit/value are books that deserve to be taken seriously (that aren't, necessarily) or books that reward rereading because they have the potential to provoke serious thought and speculation. An amusing read may be an amusing read and not be a book with merit, or a book that has value.
Notes on Widows and Widowers
I am gathering these tidbits as part of a conversation about Finwë, father of Feanor, who remarried after the death of his wife.
from The Body and Society by Peter Brown
In his discussion of the "first decades of the second century," Brown says that, "Christian marital codes were rendered yet more idiosyncratic by a few novel features, such as the relinquishment of divorce and a growing prejudice against the remarriage of widows and widowers" (60)
***
A bit of insight into Tertullian's opposition to remarriage for widowers: coming out of an ever-developing tradition that continence was, first, a sign of, and in later thought, preparation for or necessary for a prophet,
Tertullian's view of the ideal leadership of the Church was a Spiritfulled gerontocracy. Those who sat on the benches reserved for the clergy and leaders of the community were elderly widows and widowers. They had long experience of life. This experience had included the begetting and the rearing of children, in the distant, hot years of youth, before the sexual urge "fizzled out" with the approach of age. The addressee of his Exhortation to Chastity was one such widower. He was to be no charismatic wanderer. He needed to be warned against temptations no more lurid than a hankering for remarriage. Tertullian set about advising him to take in a Christian "sister," to live with him, as a companion, to keep house for him. Sexual urges that had to be sternly repressed in the young were unlikely, in Tertullian's opinion, to afflict an elderly gentleman of prophetic inclinations. (79).
