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Abstract
In the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly common to speak of literacies in the plural. In place of the notion of literacy as a simple matter of decoding words on a page and reproducing written language, and as a skill one either does or does not have, we now distinguish between different kinds of literacy, many of which are deemed essential for modern life. It is now almost routine to speak of digital literacy, "scientific literacy," or financial literacy, to cite just a few examples among many. The resurgence of classical rhetoric began in the mid-twentieth century in part to address the increasing literacy demands that have arisen with new forms of communication. This study explores rhetorical illiteracy within the novels of three writers spanning the first half of the twentieth century. Each novel grapples with the often baffling and sometimes alienating changes that swept through American culture and forever altered the texture, pace, and complexity of life as well as the lexicon with which we describe or shape it. Edith Whartons The House of Mirth (1905), William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man (1952) might seem to have little in common with one another, depicting as they do such disparate experiences of American life. From the privileged classes in turn-of-the-century New York, to small- town Mississippians living in the aftermath of civil war, to a young African-American traveling north to Harlem and into the social and political cross-hairs of racism, communism, pan-Africanism, and a host of other forces meeting at mid-centuryall three novels feature characters ill at ease in their putative home language. These novels illustrate that literacy in the first half of the twentieth century was far more complex than is often assumed and not nearly so removed from the kinds demanded of present citizens of the information age and knowledge economy. Moreover, all three novels defy taxonomies imposed by others that serve to limit expressive possibility, reveling instead in a proliferation of meaning, a profusion of significationor, as Ellisons protagonist proclaims, a world of infinite possibilities.