Literacies, Hermeneutics, and Literature

With the development of new information and communication technologies, new concepts of extending the concept of literacy have emerged, such as media literacy, computer literacy, and information literacy. This paper addresses literary literacy as a form of extended literacies. The notion of literary here comprehends widely various fields of literature, with artistic literature as one, although in a sense paradigmatic, instance. The aspects of reading and literacy emphasized in this paper will have particular educational significance in contexts of general school education. Hermeneutics is a classical discipline of how we should read. It emphasizes aspects of appropriative, or Bildung-oriented, reading that we can oppose to the instrumental use of what one reads. Within hermeneutics, and particularly the sociological studies of literature, the paper also finds foundations for critical reading. There would be, however, a tension between the fundamentally hermeneutical appropriative literacy and critical questioning, and the notion of literary literacy should contain a dialect between them. The paper emphasizes the significance of literary literacy, since there is a danger that it disappears behind more instrumentally emphasized notions of literacy. Similarly, there is a risk that the everyday plausibility of the demand of being critical suffocates the appropriative aspects of literacy and reading.