Literacy.

Is Literacy Relevant in Times of Tribulation, Suffering or Progress?

Just a couple of months ago, Umberto Eco, a significant semiotician, writer and philosopher passed away leaving us a legacy of words. He believed that literacy could donate immortality to readers who, at the age of 70, will have lived not only their own life, but also Dante Alighieri’s psychological journey throughout the afterlife, Romeo’s forbidden love for Juliet and George Orwell’s political protest. He deemed books as creatures to be preserved against the opposite force of oblivion, because they represent a storehouse for the memories of the world.

The term literacy comes from the Latin word littera, which simply means ‘letter from the alphabet’, although it stands for a much more extended concept; literacy could in fact be defined as the most potent and effective instrument that humanity had the fortuity to be blessed with. Liesel Meminger, in ‘The Book Thief’, grows up acknowledging the force contained in words during a tormented discovery of the cruel outside world. As a young girl living in Nazi Germany, Liesel finds herself a safe shelter in books that, at the same time, serve as a distraction from her personal struggles and increase her self-awareness of reality. Her acts of thievery symbolize the instinctive need for an escape from the oppressive system where she happened to live in, becoming an expression of her insatiable hunger of knowledge. Therefore, literacy plays a fundamental role in times of crisis or development because it provides an evasion from adversities, painting a completely new landscape in the reader’s point of view that may even bring social advantages; however, one might argue that reading is inherently a pointless and inconsequential action since it does not aim to anything but abstract enlightenment.

In questa prima parte del mio tema di fine semestre e` espresso tutto cio` che ho da dire. 

Enjoy.

-Vale