Introduction to (re)Making Language:
Author Seth Graves discusses in his article how during the Enlightenment Era, the literacy rates of people all across United States had begun to increase rapidly. Citizens of the colonies had seen successful revolutions in the French colony of Haiti based on enlightenment ideas, which would ultimately become the foundation for the American Revolution. He uses the monster in the gothic novel Frankenstein to depict how language can have such a dramatic effect on both our knowledge and thoughts.
Language, Discourse, and Literacy:
Graves explains how language is “referred to an interaction recognized by a specific community” and how it can be represented by a symbolic form of communication. A set of multiple languages used by the writer ultimately creates a discourse (ways of being in the world). This specific knowledge of a discourse community is what describes a literacy, which has developed from being defined as the ability to read and write to include “using language within a specific discursive space”.