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Abstract
In this article, I review influential contributions made by writing-studies researchers to the research literature on literacy sponsorship. Through this review, I show how subsequent studies have reiterated three basic assumptions of Deborah Brandt's pioneering oral-history project. However, I also demonstrate that later writing-studies research on literacy sponsorship has tended to narrow Brandt's expansive notion of literacy sponsors to denote people exclusively. I link this trend to subsequent studies' greater reliance on personal narratives as evidence sources. This genre typically concentrates power of influence in human actors. In this way, I propose that the rhetoric of literacy narratives “sponsors,” or enables and constrains, the literacy-related experiences of researchers as well as study participants, and of teachers as well as students. Moreover, I suggest that future literacy-sponsorship studies might attend particularly to the affective force of narrative rhetoric, or literacy narratives' power to fascinate, repel, and otherwise move audiences and recounters. Drawing on important terms in Brandt's work on literacy sponsorship, I outline directions for future research that would examine literacy sponsors as rhetorical “figures,” literacy narratives as “scenes” of literacy sponsorship and literacy sponsorship as “involvement.”
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. “Sponsors of Literacy” was Brandt's first formal presentation of the analytic construct by which she had interpreted her study participants' personal accounts of their literacy-related experiences. While Brandt had used the term sponsor in previous article publications related to her study (e.g., Citation1994, Citation1995), she had not defined, explained, or justified this analytic construct in those texts.
2. See Bleich (Citation2001, Citation2003) for more on the materiality of rhetoric.
3. See White (Citation1987) for more on content-form relations.
4. Throughout this article, I provide citations both for Brandt's original articles and for her 2001 book, Literacy in American Lives, if applicable. Some of these passages differ in phrasing. In such cases, I quote the updated 2001 version in the text of this article and include the citation for the original phrasing in a note.
5. See Brandt (Citation1999, p. 375) for alternate phrasing.
6. The original title for Literacy in American Lives was Pursuing Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century (Brandt, Citation1998, p. 165).
7. See Brandt (Citation1999, p. 375) for alternate phrasing.
8. See Brandt (Citation1998, p. 168) for alternate phrasing.
9. Likewise, Brandt (Citation2001) described Selfe's 1999 book simply as a source of “fascinating facts about investment in computer technology, especially as it affects computer education” (p. 232).
10. Throughout this article, I refer to work on the LCM project that is mentioned both in Lindquist's 2010 article and in Halbritter and Lindquist's 2012 article as “Lindquist and Halbritter's study,” in keeping with the order of Principal Investigators presented on the LCM website. However, when discussing claims made in only one of these publications, I retain the order of authors listed for each article.
11. See Brandt (Citation1994, p. 473) for alternate phrasing.
12. In their Citation2002 article, Brandt and Clinton proposed that literacy itself may be a sponsor of literacy: “literacy acts as a social agent, as an independent mediator” (p. 349).
13. In his discussion of psychotherapeutic social interactions, sociologist Goffman (Citation1974) also referred to such “not quite literal” yet nonetheless “significant figures”: “The reprisal principle of ordinary social intercourse is held in abeyance by the therapist, a wide range of ‘acting-out’ behavior being tolerated by him [sic] in support of the doctrine that the client's behavior is directed not at the therapist but at significant figures into which the therapist is projectively transformed, in short, that the behavior is not quite literal, although the client may be unaware of this” (p. 386).
14. Riley (Citation2004) emphasizes that even private inner speech, what she calls “my most intimate incarnation,” is fashioned from the words of others, and is thus “impersonal and secondhand” (p. 76).
15. In revising her 1994 article as a chapter of her 2001 book, Brandt replaced the term “self-sponsored” (Citation1994, p. 465) with “self-initiated” (2001, p. 154), a preference that she also exercised in her 1998 article “Sponsors of Literacy” (p. 171).
16. See Brandt (2001, pp. 39, 68, 85, 130, 140, 159), and Halbritter and Lindquist (Citation2012, pp. 171–172, 176, 190).
17. See Brandt (2001, pp. 4, 12, 20, 26, 74, 91, 95, 104, 110, 143, 155, 192–193, 207), and Halbritter and Lindquist (Citation2012, pp. 172, 174–182, 184-195).
18. As Halbritter and Lindquist (Citation2012) have acknowledged, this sense of scene as “setting” resonates with Burke's (1945/Citation1969) use of “scene” (when and where) – along with “act” (what), “agent” (who), “agency” (how), and “purpose” (why) – in his “dramatistic pentad,” a heuristic for analyzing the rhetoric of “human motivation” (p. xv). This reference to Burke may have contributed to Halbritter and Lindquist's (Citation2012) analytic decision not to theorize “scenes” as sponsoring “agents” (pp. 177, 188). However, unlike Halbritter and Lindquist, who with other literacy-sponsorship researchers, have tended to proceed from literal interpretations of narrative settings, Burke analyzed scene as an element of narrative rhetoric. Drawing on Burke's rhetorical sense of scene, future literacy-sponsorship research might explore rhetorical practices by which literacy narratives, including those recounted by researchers, differentiate among characters, settings, actions, resources, and aims; and concentrate or distribute power across these influences. Such work might also make use of Burke's notion of “ratios,” or hierarchical relations among narrative elements, consistent with Aristotelian poetics, especially “scene-act” (setting-action) and “scene-agent” (setting-character) ratios. In discussing ratios, Burke exposed how these “container-contained” metonymies, which may also be reversed, promote and limit theories of power (pp. 3–20). His work may thus be extended to theories of literacy sponsorship.
19. In later publications, Gubrium and Holstein referred to “the setting in which [a narrative] is presented” as “scenic presence” (Citation2009, p. 76). See also Holstein and Gubrium (Citation2000, pp. 190–197).
20. My theorization of narrative scenes as the coincidence of narrated contexts and contexts of narrative production is reminiscent of Young's (Citation1987) identification of three narrative contexts: “taleworld,” “storyrealm,” and “realm of conversation.” However, Young's work relies on a distinction between story (events) and narrative discourse (presentation of events). In contrast, my understanding of narrated contexts and contexts of narrative production, and of narrative scenes (or narrative collaboration as relational context), is that they are all inextricable from rhetoric.
21. Other narrative researchers have also documented such interfaces between narrated contexts and contexts of narrative production, though they have not theorized them as narrative scenes (e.g., Wortham, Citation2001; Citation2006).
22. However, as Brandt (Citation2001a) cautioned, it is imperative not to reduce the work of literacy sponsorship to teaching alone. By extension, it is important to consider sponsoring literacy narratives as potentially more, or even other, than pedagogical resources.
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Ann M. Lawrence
Ann M. Lawrence, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and writing at Michigan State University. Her research interests include narrative rhetoric and research literacies.