“The Keeper of the Books” is a haunting poem penned by Jorge Luis Borges about a dozen years after he became the director of the National Library of Argentina and began losing his sight.¹ The increasing inaccessibility of the written word must have affected both his physical routines and his intellectual and spiritual self. “El Guardián de los Libros” can be read as an expression of these difficulties. To be installed in his position as director of the library just as his ability to read was receding must have created special ironies. Hence, it is not surprising that Borges’s work...

The terms of the literacy debate in Western culture have been set by a range of theoretical discourses produced by academics, governmental agencies, and business interests. Each theorist—and there are hundreds—proposes a notion of literacy from a specific location in time and space, imagining it differently, according to his or her origins, interests, goals, and expectations. In the process, a narrative is constructed within the closure of a complex ideology, within a semantic field. Examining three discourses produced by Walter J. Ong, E. D. Hirsch Jr., and J. Elspeth Stuckey can help illustrate the nature of our collective...

Within Western culture, the universe of knowledge has traditionally been imagined and constructed by the creation of lists that became encyclopedic. Hsiang’s imaginings of his library are dreams of access to an encyclopedia that mirrors the universe. The origin of the termencyclopediareverberates down halls of learning and tells us something about imagining literacy. Its modern spelling is the result of a mistaken transcription of the Greekenkuklios paideia, meaning “general education,” intoenkuklopaideia. It is derived fromencyclical, meaning “general or wide circulation,” andpaideia, meaning “education and training” and is related to the root forchild. Hence...

Forty years ago American supermarkets did not generally carry ginger root. To find it, a shopper had to visit an Asian food market. Today it would be hard to find a major market that does not offer ginger root alongside carrots and potatoes. Though many have not come into contact with rhizomes in nature, the iris rhizome being the model I recall from my childhood, most have seen ginger root, if not eaten it. The appearance of ginger root as a commonplace is a result of cuisines traveling with immigrants to this nation. Ginger is a rhizome. Organic structures without...

There is a place where for an admission fee of about thirty-five dollars (an average cost of two-fifty per hour for up to fourteen hours a day), the spectator can choke down as much as fourteen miles¹ of film image projected on screens of unimaginable diversity, employing every means available for display. The films are rarely delivered in a standard 35 mm or 70 mm format. Instead, the spectator’s visual field is filled by 120-, 180-, 360-degree screens, by screens that rotate in complex patterns, by collections of screens uniquely arranged and constructed, by screens appearing in odd and unexpected...

Three thousand miles from the Smithsonian Institution, California’s first library is preserved in its original location at Carmel Mission, which is both a museum and a working parish. By 1778, Father Junipero Serra had accumulated 30 books, and at the time of his death in 1784 the library had grown to 50 volumes. By 1834 it comprised 179 titles. That same year, William Hartnell founded California’s first college, called Patrocino de Señor San Jose, near Salinas. Its original library collection is also preserved at the mission. Hartnell’s corpus included Stockdale’s Shakespeare;The Elements of Euclid, by Robert Simon, M.D.; a...

This thesis weaves together a series of delicately related strands. Like the rhizomes of knowledge it discusses, it knots over itself again and again. In so doing, it fails to follow many leads to their ultimate conclusion, often coming to a stop, swerving, and beginning again in another direction. This is what rhizomes do. This text mirrors the tropes it suggests we should use to imagine literacy. Like the tricksters it names as intrinsic to our confusions about the nature of knowledge, it transmogrifies itself. This is no more perverse than tricksters are perverse. The methodology bred itself out of...