Deborah Brandt

Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice

This essay reflects on how the social practice model of literacy, an approach that defines reading and writing as situated, social practices, under-theorizes certain aspects of literacy, making it hard to account fully for its workings in local contexts. We trace this theoretical blind spot to the ways that the social practice model was formulated as a challenge to the “Great Divide” or “autonomous” models of literacy. We suggest that in rejecting a conception of literacy as a deterministic force, the revisionists critique veers too far in a reactive direction. By exaggerating the power of local contexts to define the meaning and forms that literacy takes and by under-theorizing the potentials of the technology of literacy, methodological bias and conceptual impasses are created. To open new directions for literacy research we suggest more attention be paid to the material dimensions of literacy. Drawing on the work of Bruno LaTour (1993, 1996), we seek to theorize the transcontextualized and transcontextualizing potentials of literacy = particularly its ability to travel, integrate, and endure. Finally, we propose a set of analytical constructs that treat literacy not solely as an outcome or accomplishment of local practices, but also as a participant in them. By restoring a “thing status” to literacy, we can attend to the role of literacy in human action. The logic of such a perspective suggests that understanding what literacy is doing with people in a setting is as important as understanding what people are doing with literacy in a setting.

Sponsors of Literacy

the United States, Joseph Kett describes the intellectual atmosphere available to young apprentices who worked in the small, decentralized print shops of antebellum America. Because printers also were the solicitors and editors of what they published, their workshops served as lively incubators for literacy and political discourse. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, this learning space was disrupted when the invention of the steam press reorganized the economy of the print industry. Steam presses were so expensive that they required capital outlays beyond the means of many printers. As a result, print jobs were outsourced, the processes of editing and printing were split, and, in tight competition, print apprentices became low-paid mechanics with no more access to the multi-skilled environment of the craft-

Writing for a Living Literacy and the Knowledge Economy

This article seeks to explore the influence of the knowledge economy on the status of writing and literacy. It inquires into what happens to writers and their writing when texts serve as the chief commercial products of an organization—when such high-stakes factors as corporate reputation, client base, licensing, competitive advantage, growth, and profit rely on what and how people write. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 12 individuals employed in writing-intensive positions, it examines the organization of workplaces for the production of texts, the work of writers as mediational means within the workplace, the growing presence of regulatory controls on the production of writing, and the ways that demands for innovation and change affect writers and their writing. This is an exploratory installment in a larger project that seeks to situate the rise of mass writing in the United States, since about 1960, not only as an economic phenomenon but as a new development in the history of literacy with serious cultural, political, social, and personal implications.

The Cognitive as the Social An Ethnomethodological Approach to Writing Process Research

This article explores the uses of ethnomethodology in developing a robust sociocognitive theory of writing. Ethnomethodology, a radical movement in sociology that studies peoples sense-making practices, has some parallel interests with cognitive-process research in composition. At the same time, because ethnomethodology is attuned to how sense-making involves organizing social structure, it also shares parallel interests with social-constructionist thought in composition. This article uses ethnomethodological perspectives to translate the language of Flower and Hayess cognitive theory of writing into a more thoroughly social vocabulary as a way of articulating the role of social context and social structure in individual acts of writing.

Toward an Understanding of Context in Composition

Contradictory approaches to context and written language have clouded understanding of the nature and role of context in composition. This article treats writing within a larger framework of context and language use in general to suggest important interrelationships among writer, context, and text. Implications for writing-process research are examined.

The Message Is the Massage: Orality and Literacy Once More.

This essay reappraises conventional distinctions between oral-like and literate-like discourse, particularly Tannens (1985) distinction between involvement focus and message focus. Rather than seeing message in tension with involvement, this query treats message as an embodiment of involvement. Cohesion particularly is treated as an aspect of a developing writer-reader relationship, an outgrowth of a thickening commitment to a mutual orientation. Speculations are offered for rethinking what is called “literate orientation.”

A Commentary on Literacy Narratives as Sponsors of Literacy.

This brief commentary first clarifies Brandts concept of sponsors of literacy in light of the way the concept has been taken up in writing studies. Then it treats Brandts methods for handling accounts of literacy learning in comparison with other ways of analyzing biographical material. Finally it takes up Lawrences argument about literacy narratives as sponsors of literacy.