[This word can be used both literally, as in the first example, and figuratively, in the sense of ill-informed or uneducated, as in the second example.]_ It is not so surprising when one reflects that all cultures possess a literature. In an analphabetic culture, the literature will be an oral one. (Scott Herring, Du Bois and the Minstrels, [W.E.B. du Bois], Melus, 06/22/1997, p. 3.)
In “The Lost Art of Reading,” here is the news [from author David] Ulin:… that the analphabetic anger of anonymous Internet comment threads is emblematic of a “degraded cultural conversation” in which “the ability to carry out a logical argument” has been lost. (Christopher Beha, “Our Unlettered Landscape,” The New York Times, 11/26/2010.)
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