Success as Failure and Failure as Success: The Cultural Literacy of E. D. Hirsch, Jr

This article examines the logic and rhetoric of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. in Cultural Literacy, attempts to answer the question of how intellectual failure guarantees success in the marketplace, and concludes with an alternative vision of the American society that Hirsch glowingly describes and with the suggestion that Hirsch's cultural literacy is in fact cross-culturalilliteracy. The subsequent publication of the Hirschian Dictionary of Cultural Literacy occasions a postscript that examines the mindset of a comfortable white gerontocracy as it manifests itself in the Dictionary's comic arrogance yet trivial accomplishement.