Literacy, Reading, Writing
Last update: 27 Sep 2025 07:32First version: Before 13 March 1995
- Recommended:
- Carlo M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West
- Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
- Ernest Gellner
- Plow, Sword and Book
- Nations and Nationalism [Review: Necessary Forged Papers]
- Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind
- Dan Sperber, The Future of Writing
- L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society
- Not sure if I do recommend:
- Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato [Tentative comments]
- Dis-recommended:
- Anything by Marshall McLuhan
- To read:
- Marilyn Jager Adams, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print
- Deborah Brandt, The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy
- Jenny Cook-Gumperz (ed.), The Social Construction of Literacy
- Stanislas Dehane, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
- Andrea diSessa, Changing Minds: Computers, Literacy and Learning
- James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
- Jack Goody
- The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society
- Power of the Written Tradition
- William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy
- Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations
- Anna Missiou, Literacy and Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens [Review in BMCR]
- James J. O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace
- David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading
- Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy
- Victoria Purcell-Gates, Erik Jacobson and Sophie Degener, Print Literacy Development: Uniting Cognitive and Social Practice Theories [The idea that there is a conflict between seeing something as a cognitive skill and as a social practice seems to me utterly absurd --- how else are social practices to be implemented? But I realize not everyone encountered my gurus (Herbert Simon, Dan Sperber) at an impressionable age..]
- Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy
- Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece
- Deborah Tarn Steiner, The Tyrant's Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece
- David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe