In a recent article, Richard Ohmann has characterized literacy in a remarkably concise fashion. As he says:

Literacy is an activity of social groups, and a necessary feature of some kinds of social organization. Like every other human activity or product, it embeds social relations within it. And these relations always include conflict as well as cooperation. Like language itself, literacy is an exchange between classes, races, the sexes, and so on. (1985: 685)

In this paper I will try to draw out the implications of such a view--that literacy is an activity which 'embeds social relations'...of 'conflict as well as cooperation'. Beginning with the work of Foucault on the institutionalization of particular discursive practices, I will briefly trace the historical development of social conceptions of literacy in the United States and England. That history reveals what is all too often missing in Foucault's accounts--a direct motive in class conflict for the institutional shaping of discourse. Turning then to discuss the particularly effective linking of literacy and linguistic prescriptivism, I will note ways in which work by Gramsci and Bourdieu helps us to think about these matters, whether viewing them as historical process or contemporary practice. Ending on a critical note, I will try briefly to explore some of the difficulties of wedding studies of language to accounts of social reproduction, using the notion of literate tradition as an exemplary case of just this dilemma.

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