Endnotes

1.Encyclopedia, or reasoned dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts, published by a society of men of letters. back

2. See the Oxford English and American Heritage dictionaries and Hankins 163-170. back

3. A Porphyrian tree is a Manneristic maze. back

4.This maze is a trap in which you continually repeat mistakes without exit (Eco 81). back

5.Hirsch's 1987 Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know was preceded by a series of articles and followed in 1988 by The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know co-edited by Hirsch, Joseph F. Kett and James Trefil and the children's version, First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Our Children Need to Know which were followed by another series of articles defending the Cultural Literacy program. The 1987 dictionary was updated in 1993. back

6. The best comprehensive critique I have uncovered is "Schooling, Culture and Literacy in the Age of Broken Dreams: A Review of Bloom and Hirsch," by Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux in Harvard Educational Review, vol. 5, no. 2, May 1988, 172-194. back

7. Voodoo is, of course, one local knowledge which is almost always denigrated in Western cultural ideology. back

8. Hirsch's publisher has "trademarked" the term cultural literacy although I find no instances of the activation of this trademark. Perhaps they anticipated a series of competing products purporting to convey their own brand of cultural literacy. In any case, the construct cultural literacy ™ provides a fascinating mantra.back

9. From the introduction to Global Literacy, in manuscript. back

10. These three have been nicknamed, "the killer bees," by their opponents. back

11. The dictionary was used as a basis for the 1989 National Academic Decathlon Competition, conducted for American high school "whiz kids." (Thanks to Analisa Narareno's UCSC essay, "What every reader should know about The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" for this nugget.) back

12. Sandoval's notion of oppositional consciousness has influenced the deep structure of my thinking. back

13. Chapter four, "The Trope of the Talking Book," in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism points out the relationship between imagining freedom and imagining literacy in a number of examples. John Jea's "midnight dream of instruction. . .represents the dream of freedom as the dream of literacy, a dream realized as if by a miracle of literacy (166)." back

14. This term is borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss who begins his discussion in The Savage Mind with a reference to the French term 'bricoleur,' signifying an individual who undertakes odd jobs and is able to do what needs to be done by resorting to a collection of tools and materials which have been collected over time. These tools bear no relation to the current project, or to any particular project but are nevertheless brought to bear by the bricoleur out of the necessity of the moment. These tools and materials have been collected over time as a result of circumstance. Literacy can indeed be thought of as a bricoleur's skill (16-18). back