How to read, and what for: literatures and literacies in our time, our place

Abstract

Recognizing that print·based literacy is no longer adequate for full and alert participation in today's net-worked environment of the knowledge-based global economy and the so-called new "communication order", educationists have been urging schools to teach (as one teachers' handbook puts it) 'the multi literacies of the information age' - basically multimodal , screen-based, electronic media literacies. As it is not enough for students to be able merely to function in print and electronic modes of literacy, new pedagogies informed by the theoretical and methodological assumptions of cultural studies have been designed in tandem to promote an active 'critical literacy' decode, demystify these new 'texts' and to empower the reader. Meanwhile, Literature seems to be losing its status as a separate subject in universities in the West in being absorbed into Cultural Studies even as it becomes increasingly regarded as part of a larger cultural and symbolic system that is no longer national, but transnational or global, along with its

medium, the English language. Among the concerns of this conference is 'the process of nation- building and concept of nationhood' and it has been a given that a 'national literature' and 'national

language' are intrinsically part of these. Previously before the advent of postmodernism, 'the training of critical awareness' and the 'discriminating' reader of literature included the capacity for a 'discerning appreciation': s/he read not to detect and expose social and therefore, power relations, but also to appreciate continuities or 'tradition' and 'value' either as aesthetic or ethical phenomena. Nowadays, evaluative judgment especially with regard to 'tradition' and 'moral' value could be (and has been strongly) said to mask power relations, and understandably, such 'appreciation' is considered politically incorrect, Edward Said's work having alerted us to literature's entanglement with culture and politics in the postcolonial context. Driven underground, evaluation does (or should) problematize for still-existing English Language and Literature departments at local non-Anglo-Saxon universities such as ours, what texts or what literatures in English to teach, how to read them, and what for. What is Literature's relation to the other kinds of literacies at a time when interest in Literature as a subject (at least in Singapore) at secondary schools is declining as students grapple with bilingualism and the curriculum expands to teach multimodal literacies via other texts, abandoning the specificity of literature in a climate of cultural studies influenced by sociological approaches? What are the implications for national or local identities of the 'new realities' of global cultural developments including English as the dominant global language?