PhD Idea - Literacy and Oracy in American Autodidacts
I like autobiographies, and I like education, and I like self-education. I've been thinking about doing a PhD and combining those subjects in some way. I came up with five autobiographies of Americans who largely taught themselves in advanced literacy and oracy. I went back and forth with an AI to see what that research and writing might look like. This is what I came up with.
Working Title
Making Themselves in Words: Autodidactic Education and the Self-Explanation of Self-Formation in American Autobiography
Possible subtitle:
Literacy, Oracy, and Self-Directed Education from Benjamin Franklin to Louis L'Amour
Proposed Field
The project could be situated within History of Education, American Studies, Intellectual/Cultural History, or Education, and is particularly suitable for a cumulative PhD or PhD by publication.
Research Topic
This project examines how prominent American autodidacts explained their own education and self-formation in autobiography, with particular attention to the roles they attributed to literacy and oracy.
The principal subjects are:
1. Benjamin Franklin: the runaway apprentice.
2. Frederick Douglass: the fugitive from slavery.
3. Andrew Carnegie: the immigrant worker.
4. Malcolm X: the prisoner.
5. Louis L'Amour: the itinerant worker and wanderer, or hobo.
(I like the archetypal list of: runaway, fugitive, immigrant, prisoner, hobo. Then compare that with all they accomplished later, what a unique and interesting set of people.)
Each followed a substantially nontraditional educational path and later produced an autobiographical account in which learning played an important role.
Rather than attempting to reconstruct a complete objective history of each person's development, the dissertation focuses primarily upon how each person retrospectively explained his own formation.
The autobiographies are therefore the principal primary texts.
Other historical sources and scholarly biographies will be used selectively to provide context, clarify important issues, and evaluate the interpretation of the texts, rather than to construct five comprehensive biographies.
Central Research Question
How did prominent American autodidacts explain their own self-formation, and what roles did literacy and oracy play in those autobiographical explanations?
Secondary Questions
The project will examine how each autobiographer explains his initial educational circumstances; why he began educating himself; what roles he assigns to reading and writing; what roles he assigns to listening, conversation, debate, storytelling, teaching, and public speaking; what educational experiences he identifies as turning points; what changes he attributes to self-education in knowledge, character, identity, agency, vocation, and social position; how private learning becomes public communication; and what similarities and differences appear across the five accounts.
A further question concerns autobiography itself:
How does the later narrator transform a complex life into a coherent explanation of how he became himself?
Core Concepts
Autodidactic Education
Autodidactic education refers to learning substantially directed by the learner outside, beyond, or in place of conventional formal schooling.
It does not imply that the learner receives no help from other people. Books, libraries, mentors, coworkers, friends, debating partners, workplaces, and other institutions may all contribute to an autodidactic education.
Self-Formation
Self-formation refers to the development of knowledge, abilities, character, identity, ambitions, agency, and ways of acting that the autobiographer associates with his education and experience.
Self-Explanation
Self-explanation refers to the autobiographer's retrospective account of why and how he believes he became the person he became.
This distinction is central to the project.
The dissertation does not need to prove that an autobiographer's explanation is objectively correct. Instead, it asks what the person himself regarded as formative and how he constructed a causal explanation of his life.
Literacy
Literacy will include reading, writing, vocabulary development, copying and imitation, correspondence, books, newspapers, libraries, and other uses of written language.
Oracy
Oracy will include listening, conversation, questioning, argument, debate, recitation, storytelling, teaching, lecturing, and public speaking.
The project will investigate whether literacy and oracy play different but complementary roles in autobiographical accounts of self-formation.
Principal Primary Corpus
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
Other autobiographical works by the subjects may be consulted where useful, but they will remain supplementary rather than becoming additional principal texts.
Source Strategy
The autobiographies will constitute the principal evidence.
Secondary scholarship will provide historical and intellectual context.
Supplementary primary sources such as letters, speeches, interviews, contemporary newspaper accounts, or records will be consulted selectively when necessary to clarify an important autobiographical claim or educational episode.
The project will explicitly not attempt comprehensive archival reconstruction of all five lives.
This limitation is intentional because the dissertation studies autobiographical self-explanation rather than attempting to produce five intellectual biographies.
Method
The project will use comparative qualitative textual analysis informed by the history of education, intellectual and cultural history, American Studies, and life-writing scholarship.
Each autobiography will first be analyzed independently according to a common framework: starting circumstances, motivation for self-education, literacy, oracy, formative experiences, perceived transformation, agency/mobility, retrospective self-explanation.
The five cases will then be compared to identify recurring patterns and historical differences.
Particular attention will be given to passages in which the narrator explicitly or implicitly constructs causal relationships, such as:
"I read this, and therefore..."
"This person taught me..."
"This experience changed me..."
"From that point..."
"I realized..."
"I determined..."
"I learned..."
Such passages reveal the autobiographer's own theory of his formation.
Proposed Cumulative Publication Structure
The ideal project would consist of five individual case-study papers and one comparative paper.
Paper 1: Benjamin Franklin
The Runaway Apprentice Educates Himself: Literacy, Conversation, and Self-Formation in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography
Paper 2: Frederick Douglass
Learning Freedom, Finding a Voice: Literacy, Oracy, and Self-Formation in Frederick Douglass's Narrative
Paper 3: Andrew Carnegie
The Immigrant Worker as Autodidact: Reading, Work, Communication, and Self-Formation in Andrew Carnegie's Autobiography
Paper 4: Malcolm X
Reading into a New Life: Literacy, Debate, and Public Voice in The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Paper 5: Louis L'Amour
The World as Classroom: Reading, Listening, Work, and Wandering in Education of a Wandering Man
Paper 6: Comparative Study
Explaining the Self-Taught Life: Literacy, Oracy, and Autodidactic Self-Formation in American Autobiography
The exact number of papers could be adjusted to the requirements of the university. A German cumulative doctorate might require only a subset of the strongest papers plus an integrative dissertation essay, while the complete six-paper portfolio could also support a later retrospective PhD-by-publication application in the UK.
Preliminary Thesis
The project will test the proposition that autobiographical accounts of autodidactic education frequently assign related but distinguishable roles to literacy and oracy.
Literacy may be narrated primarily as expanding access to knowledge, ideas, reflection, and intellectual possibilities.
Oracy may be narrated as allowing the developing individual to test ideas, interact with others, persuade, teach, lead, and exercise public agency.
The project will also examine whether autobiographers retrospectively transform complex, socially dependent processes of development into relatively coherent narratives of individual self-making.
The likely pattern to investigate is: literacy and oracy, self-directed learning, self-formation, increased agency, autobiographical self-explanation.
This is a hypothesis to be tested rather than an assumed conclusion.
Expected Contribution
The project's principal contribution would be to combine several areas that are usually treated separately.
It would examine autodidactic education rather than schooling alone; study oracy alongside literacy; distinguish self-formation from retrospective self-explanation; treat autobiography as the principal object of historical analysis rather than merely as imperfect biographical evidence; and compare five important American autobiographical traditions over roughly two centuries.
The comparative project may also illuminate a larger American idea: How does someone who begins outside the conventional path explain becoming capable of entering, changing, or influencing the wider world?
Scope and Limitations
The project does not claim that these five individuals represent all autodidacts.
It does not assume that autobiographical memories are objectively accurate.
It does not equate Franklin's apprenticeship, Douglass's enslavement, Carnegie's immigration, Malcolm X's imprisonment, or L'Amour's wandering.
Rather, those differences make the comparison valuable.
The common object of study is the autobiographical explanation of learning and becoming.
Significance and Feasibility
The project is unusually feasible for a cumulative or distance-compatible doctorate because its principal corpus consists of five readily available texts.
It does not depend upon extensive archival travel, foreign-language research, experiments, surveys, or human participants.
Each individual study can be completed and submitted for publication independently while simultaneously contributing to the larger doctoral argument.
This makes the project suitable both for a prospective cumulative PhD and, if the publications are completed first, a retrospective PhD by publication.
One-Sentence Proposal
This project examines how Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie, Malcolm X, and Louis L'Amour retrospectively explained their autodidactic self-formation, focusing particularly on the roles they attributed to literacy and oracy in acquiring knowledge, agency, mobility, and public voice.
Find more at JeffThinks.com or JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com
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