Wax Tablets of the Mind

Book excerpt: In this volume, Jocelyn Small argues that literacy is a complex combination of various skills not just the ability to read and write: the technology of writing, the encoding and decoding of text symbols, the interpretation of meaning, the retrieval and display systems which organise how meaning is stored and memory. Wax Tablets of the Mind explores the relationship between literacy, orality and memory in classical antiquity, not only from the point of view of antiquity, but also from that of modern cognitive psychology. Jocelyn Small examines the contemporary as well as the ancient debate about how the writing tools we possess interact and affect the product, why they should do so and how the tasks required of memory change and develop with literacy's increasing output and evoking technologies.