Reviews of Books

At a time when United States leadership orbits about the letter "W" and when every interaction in the digital age seems brought to you by the letter "e," a book such as Patricia Crain's The Story of A provides a timely discussion of the alphabet's impact on national consciousness. Crain's premise is that although the alphabet seems neutral, based on inherently meaningless letters and an arbitrary letter order, it is in fact saturated with meaning by the social currents that shape culture in a particular historical moment. Her effort is to trace the "verbal and visual tropes that surround the alphabet" (p. 18), the contours of the alphabet-text as genre, and the material forms of the alphabet as embodied in pedagogical works and literary narratives. Her survey moves from the hornbook and crossrow of early modern Europe to the sponsoring letters of Sesame Street, with the argument concentrating on colonial, early national, and antebellum Anglo-America. Crain's important contribution is the focus on "alphabetization." Identifying "literacy as an action . . . rather than a state or quality," alphabetization refers to "the constellation of activities and practices--often amounting to rites and rituals, both individual and institutional--that surrounds the learning and teaching of the alphabet" (pp. 6, 7). Though the broad sweep of the work may leave some dissatisfied, Crain's interest in alphabetization opens new lines of inquiry for cultural histories of gender, childhood, reading, and education.

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Chapter 1 provides background for alphabetization's Anglo-American history by comparing the Christ-Cross Row of the Catholic church, the Orbis Pictus of Johann Comenius, and The New England Primer of Benjamin Harris. The crossrow's "alphabetic ritual" (p. 24) associated the alphabet with the prayer recitations and memory theater of church worship. Elementary literacy was acquired through oral and visual rituals, predominantly sacred and aligned with christology. But the repetition required in this mode of alphabetic learning also involved forms of verbal playfulness and arbitrary sequence that placed the letters in profane time. Comenius's literacy manual continued the alphabet's descent into the world; it used print to accommodate a child's knowledge to the visible environment. In Comenius's picture book, children encountered an encyclopedic survey of the world and heard, in an Edenic key, images of animals call back the sounds of letters ("'The Crow cryeth á á'"; p. 36). The Comenius text suggests that knowledge is redemptive, not sinful, and "that learning the alphabet must precede perceiving the world" (p. 33). Part of the alphabet tradition, The New England Primer is differentiated by its pragmatic, market-based appeal: "The Primer stands as a reminder of what else happened in Eden besides Adam's creaturely salon" (p. 39). Despite its lugubrious reputation, the text was more a commercial product than a religious lesson. Folk, market, and even carnivalesque influences shaped the couplets and signs of the Primer's image-rhyme alphabet. Yet Crain overlooks the biblical closure organizing the final ten-letter sequence; that narrative arc reinforced and culminated the religious ideology of the text. The neglect is surprising, given the important role page format and sequence play in later chapters.

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