Literacy narratives as sponsors of literacy: Past contributions and new directions for literacy-sponsorship research

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.”