Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> [CLIP]
> Now, illiteracy aside (which presents a large problem in many poor
> nations), if some ordinary literate individuals cannot understand
> Engels, it is not because they are "dummies." It is because they are
> lacking in the time, energy, & willingness necessary to make efforts
> to understand -- and such efforts must of necessity include asking
> questions & seeking answers. In other words, it is the fault of
> *neither the writer nor the readers*.
>
> [CLIP] As you may recall, when the New
> Left, second-wave feminism, gay liberation, black power, etc. were
> born & grew, many activists in the movements (& even non-activists
> beyond them) made intellectual efforts, re-discovered forgotten
> radical writers, & struggled with their ideas (reevaluating some,
> criticizing some, modifying some, ditching some). The same will
> happen again if & when mass movements on the Left emerge & grow.
>
>
Limited literacy needs to be separated from both illiteracy and from lack pf "time, energy, & willingness." In a communist group Jan & I formed in Bloomington-Normal back in the early '70s the presence of several members with little or no academic training and poor reading skills created a serious problem for internal study. We struggled with this in various ways, some successful, some not.
One technique that worked very well but required more time and energy than the three "highly literate" members could give was making tape recordings of the study texts. I recorded the whole of _Wages, Price and Profit_. I got the idea for this from quite a miscellany of sources: from Sweet's program for teaching Latin at Michigan, from my personal experience with reading Pound and Yeats, from the practice of the teacher I had in the 3rd & 5th grades, from the sort of reading I & my first wife did for our daughters, from my earliest glimpse of the coherence of the _Wasteland_, and from my experience in teaching novels in an introduction to prose fiction class for non-majors. Core ideas extracted from these sources: (1) If one goes through a text, even a quite complicated one, fast enough, it tends to teach itself; (2) One can sometimes grasp patterns and contents which are far beyond one's reading skill if one hears the book read; (3) Listening to a taped text _while_ reading it (e.g., the Latin text of the Aeneid after studying Latin for only 4 months), by forcing the pace, allows one or forces one to be content with what one can get on the fly -- which is often more than one would guess in advance of trying.
In any case it worked with the one text by Marx. A reader (or non-reader) who had been quite defeated in her initial attempts was able to participate fully in group discussions of it.
My subject line is only an oxymoron if one sees literary intelligence within the narrow bounds imposed by most classroom practice. In my intro to prose class I guaranteed students a grade and forced them to read through _Bleak House_ in about 4 weeks. This required holding conferences with them: on the whole in oral discussion _but not in written responses_ one can tell the difference between a student who has not read the text at all and one who has simply been unable to make sense of it. One student who resisted the pressure vigorously had an interesting tale to tell me late in the semester. It seems that despite frantic note-taking and intense study of the textbook he was flunking his psych class. In desperation he decided that he had nothing to lose and devoted one weekend to reading straight through the whole of the textbook, following the principle that if it doesn't make sense, just keep on going. He raised himself to a _C_ in the course after getting a B on the third test.
Incidentaly, squawks about bad writing are sort of empty. Regardless of how well or how badly a text is written. the content of a text is either needed or not needed by a potential reader. If it is not needed, what difference does it make whether it is intelligible or not. If the content _is_ needed, it is either also available in some other text, in which case read the other text and quit bellyaching. Or it is not available in any other text -- so go to work and quit bellyaching, for your sobs won't do you any good. There are people out there who have things to say but who simply can't write well, no matter how hard they try. Live with it!
Carrol