Prompt 1 on Literacy

“Characters are products of writers’ imaginations – and readers’ imaginations.” All characters, from movies to plays to novels, are created by a writer or writers in some cases. They are the people who conjure personas and past lives and realms of literary existence. The readers, though, they are the ones that bestow depth onto the fictional people. They are the ones that remove the constraints of paper from describing the characters and implement extra elements in the story. The readers can take the given information and invent the story theoretically. To recreate the story though – and understand the veiled concepts of a work – one must be literate.

Literacy implies many abilities. It primarily determines whether you can find meaning in the words actually written on the page of a novel or understand the words an actor says. Most Americans possess that essential ability. Literacy also implies though that a person can make sense of the hidden ideas in the work, whether that work is a novel or movie or play. It expands on eerie senses of an object or theme that means more than the work leads on. To reveal the hidden meanings however, one must be literate.

If someone – like an incoming AP Literature student – wants to acquire the secondary sense of literacy used to assess all hidden messages, he needs to know that the process hides in the shadows of everyday life. The literacy necessary for understanding subliminal messages is acquired by reading for uncovered meanings. In other words, the literacy used to understand specific works comes from evaluating already assimilated information of other literary works. Of course, this all intertwines with Foster’s theory of works being connected via intertextuality. If “every work teaches us how to it as we go along,” then the main, all-encompassing story can be learned as one continues reading it literally.

Therefore, to be a literate person one must pay attention to the entire story. He acquires  knowledge throughout his lifetime and brings an advanced intellect that grows with each passing day. When faced with the challenge of understanding a work, the literate man embraces the activity. He looks for hidden ideas and examines them deeply. He resurrects resting knowledge from his past readings of plays and of movies and of literature, and he implements it in his understanding of new texts. The literate man reads between the lines.