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227 Afterword Anne Ruggles Gere In 2002 I wrote a review of Literacy in American Lives in which I explained that reading Deborah Brandt’s book helped me understand my own family history better; it illuminated the many things that contributed to the fact that my mother, the youngest child, graduated from college, while her older sister received an eighth-grade education. The confluence of economic, political, and material forces meant that one sister had to leave school to work and help support the family, while another, who came of age during the Great Depression, was able to continue her education. As Deborah might put it, the two sisters had different literacy sponsors. I praised the book for calling into question a number of settled assumptions about how people learn to read and write by considering economic transformations, generational shifts in times of rapid social change, social structures that offer barriers or opportunities, and material/ideological conditions. It seemed to me at the time that this book would become important in literacy studies, and I concluded with the expectation “that we will be talking about and following the lead of her work for a long time” (2002, p. 285). Looking back from a decade later, I could take pride in my own prescience, but the truth is that I came to that review armed with a full knowledge of Deborah Brandt’s previous work. I had read drafts as well as published articles, and I knew her formidable capacity to discern the significant from the less important. I also knew her fearless willingness to point out the limitations in the theories and research of others; not that she was ever unkind, but she was intellectually courageous. In 1990, when Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts, her first book, was published, literacy scholars like Jack Goody, David Olson, and Walter J. Ong, SJ, still dominated literacy studies, and their claims about the “great divide” between the mental capacities of literate and nonliterate peoples , the autonomous text, and the cultural discontinuities between orality and literacy were accepted by many scholars. And Deborah took them on. Drawing upon understandings developed by a process approach to writing, Anne Ruggles Gere 228 she examined the interactions between writers and readers, thereby calling into question the claims that still held sway in literacy studies. So when I first read Literacy in American Lives, I expected it to be groundbreaking, and it was. Yet, even with the benefit of foreknowledge, I could not fully anticipate the effect that Literacy in American Lives would have on the field. I expected that it would be read in graduate seminars and be cited in dissertations. I imagined that Deborah Brandt’s methodology of writing life histories—she once described it as “pulverizing” individual narratives—would be taken up by others. I assumed that the concept of literacy sponsor—a category I found admirably capacious but also worryingly broad enough to leave me wondering what a sponsor is not—would be useful. What I did not foresee was the degree to which this book would become indispensable in literacy studies: the numbers of graduate students who read it; the quantity of dissertations that call upon it; the ubiquity with which “sponsor” appears in scholarship, like the manuscript I read just last evening. I did not foresee the extent to which this book would become part of my own mental architecture ; I thought about it even when I was not writing about literacy directly. I did not foresee a collection of articles like the ones in the current book, articles that debunk myths, complicate assumptions, extend categories, and interrogate ideologies. The scholarship collected here demonstrates the value of a capacious term like sponsor, putting to rest my quibble about defining its parameters, and it shows how transformative and generative Deborah’s work has been—no, is. While I am delighted to celebrate this moment in Deborah Brandt’s career , I resist thinking of her research in the past tense. I just looked through her Literacy and Learning, and I’m counting on her to develop the ideas that are sketched out in “The Status of Writing.” Ever since I read the National Endowment for the Arts’ (2004) Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, I have been thinking about the shifting relationship between reading and writing in American society. Amidst the report’s general lament about declines in the number of readers of fiction and...

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