Author Deborah Brandt will discuss the status of writing Thursday, April 17, from noon-1:30 p.m. at the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning, Room 307 of UW's Coe Library.
For more information and to register go to: www.uwyo.edu/ctl/Brandt/main.asp or call 766-4847.
A professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brandt will discuss "How Equipped Are Our Social, Cultural, and Political Institutions for Sustaining a Nation of Writers?"
Brandt is author of two award-winning books: "Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers and Texts" (1990) and "Literacy in American Lives" (2001). She is at work on a new project titled "Writing Now: New Directions in Mass Literacy."
She will examine how the growing importance of writing in economic and social life in the United States challenges ideas about literacy that developed as part of a reading literacy. Drawing on the observations of everyday Americans about the writing they do at work at beyond, she demonstrates how writing threatens to undermine the moral order that has conditioned mass literacy.
"The United States was founded as a nation for readers," she says. "But as writing comes to rival reading as a focus of mass literate experience, we can ask: How equipped are our social, cultural, and political institutions for sustaining a nation of writers?"
The Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning, LeaRN, and the Wyoming School-University Partnership sponsor Thursday's talk.
