| Blithering Agamemnon: The Borders of Literacy | p. 3 |
| Literacy and Consciousness | p. 4 |
| The Wild Boy and Gracie Allen | p. 10 |
| Agamemnon and the Physical Basis of Literacy | p. 15 |
| Literacy and Language | p. 21 |
| Chief Cobb vs. Themistocles: The Technologies of Rhetoric, Reading, and Writing | p. 29 |
| Rhetoric | p. 30 |
| Reading and Writing | p. 32 |
| Athens: Writing as a Cultural Force | p. 40 |
| Sparta and Fear of Writing | p. 56 |
| Word against Empire: Literacy and Power | p. 61 |
| Rome: Universal Language and World Domination | p. 62 |
| The Revolutionary Literacy of the Church | p. 69 |
| Formal and Vernacular Literacy in the Middle Ages | p. 75 |
| Literacy as Battleground: Then and Now | p. 83 |
| When Media Collide: Literacy and the Advent of Print | p. 86 |
| Media Use Is Organic | p. 88 |
| "Get It in Writing!": Medieval Written Culture | p. 90 |
| The Word, the Press, and the Reformation: John Wycliffe | p. 98 |
| The Text, the Press, and Orthodoxy: John Donne | p. 104 |
| The Word and Revolution: John Bunyan | p. 107 |
| The Miltonic Compromise: Old Made New | p. 109 |
| Print and Television | p. 114 |
| Iran to Ann Landers: Fallacies about Literacy and Development | p. 118 |
| Skill in Reading and Writing Does Not a Mighty Nation Make | p. 119 |
| The Iranian Example | p. 124 |
| The Psychological Burden of Illiteracy | p. 129 |
| The Prisoner Phenomenon | p. 134 |
| Hopefully into the Future: John Locke and Correct Usage | p. 138 |
| Standard Usage and the Rise of Capitalism | p. 139 |
| The Liberal Fallacy: Truth, Progress, and Literacy | p. 147 |
| The Cult of Correct Usage | p. 155 |
| Some Thoughts on Teaching English | p. 165 |
| Caliban in America: Literacy in the Age of Rock | p. 170 |
| Mechanical Literacy | p. 171 |
| Followers and Leaders: Two Literacies | p. 178 |
| Training the Literate Elite | p. 181 |
| Illiterate Backlash | p. 187 |
| Orthodox American Literacy | p. 190 |
| The New Literacy | p. 200 |
| Conclusion | p. 208 |
| Notes | p. 215 |
| Bibliography | p. 221 |
| Index | p. 237 |
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