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“What a Farmer Reads Shows in His Farm”: Performing Literacy with Adult Reading Primers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Abstract
Cora Wilson Stewart's Country Life Readers (1915-17), beginning reading primers designed for white Appalachian adults, contain lessons in the social meaning of reading. he formal interplay of the readers’ illustrations, text, and handwriting exercises show how Stewart's primers teach not how to read but rather how to act like a reader. By instructing students in the habits, attitudes, and behaviors that will make them seem “literate” to the wider world, the primers argue that these performances (some textual, many not) are not supplements to literacy but literacy itself. Setting Stewart's primers against other adult primers from the period further shows how these literate performances were circumscribed by race and region. Rather than dismiss this version of literacy as irredeemably “mythic,” I suggest that sources like Stewart's are evocative reminders to attend to the ways in which nonreading is always implicated in reading's meaning.
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- Special Topic: Cultures of Reading
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018
References
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