| However defined or practiced, literacy is inseparable from complex sociopolitical and pedagogical issues. In the U.S., libraries, librarians, and the American Library Association (ALA) have for over a century been at the forefront of literacy education, praxis, and advocacy.; Since 1980, national rhetoric has allied literacy with poor educational performance, deteriorating families, and declining international stature. Although a home-school-library alliance was declared essential to improvement, especially in adult and family literacy, libraries remain underfunded and negatively perceived. New professional efforts, including the sales of ALA's popular-culture-based graphics, were intended to influence public attitudes and habits regarding libraries, reading, and literacy. ALA's graphics are complex imagetexts (W. J. T. Mitchell): hybrid forms created by the synergy of visual and textual elements. Reading them requires paired literacies: verbal and visual.; ALA imagetexts, especially those allied with literacy promotions, are the object of this dissertation. Analysing over forty graphics, I situate their complex social messages within the context of U.S. library history, recent national reformist rhetoric, and ALA's articulated goals and values. My analyses are informed by studies of library history and by theoretical scholarship in the areas of critical literacy, visual literacy and representation, popular culture, semiotics, subjectivity, social construction, and gender.; I demonstrate that within ALA's imagetexts, the synergy of visual/textual social cues and popular-cultural elements serve (1) to invite our identification with those messages, (2) to simplify complex sociopolitical issues, and (3) to situate groups in certain relationships to literacy practices. I propose that increased world reliance on the use of imagetexts requires the profession develop a theoretically based critical praxis regarding their use, and provides an opportunity for leadership in shaping national understanding of the paired literacies necessitated by imagetexts.; Only an informed, critical praxis regarding imagetexts will assure their use to advance not compromise professional goals, values, commitments, and reputation. That praxis will require (1) more fully understanding die complex ways representation, signification, and the synergy of visual/verbal elements function in the production and communication of meaning, and (2) expanding professional, theoretical, political, and pedagogical understandings of visual/verbal literacies. |
