Starting to Read Rhetorically

Although most English majors and academic scholars know or have heard about literary sponsors, the rest of the world is left wondering who and what a literary sponsor is and what duties they perform. Deborah Brandt, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written multiple books and articles about literacy and is the scholar responsible for the creation of literary sponsorship. Using research gathered while writing her book Literacy in American Lives, Brandt concluded literacy is sponsored by people, institutions, and life circumstances which all allow or prevent uneducated people from becoming literate. Formulated using these conclusions, Brandt’s article “Sponsors of Literacy” was written and later published in an academic journal from 1998 titled “College Composition and Communication”. The twenty page article goes into detail about Brandt’s research and defines literary sponsors as any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy and gain advantage by it in some way.

            Deborah Brandt defines literary sponsors in her article “Sponsors of Literacy”, but it may be confusing to some readers. In general, literary sponsors may be viewed as the medium uneducated people must pass through to reach literacy. Sponsors can either help or inhibit the learner and gain an advantage from it in some way, whether it is money, power, or relations with said person. To understand the definition of a literary sponsor, it helps to remember the circumstances in which literacy was taught. If a child grows up wealthy in a large city, literary sponsors will be plentiful, but only a fraction of those sponsors would be available to a poor child who grew up outside suburbia. Standardized testing has generally proven the rich child raised in the city would become more literate than the poor country child. Not only do wealth and location affect literacy, though. Characteristics such as race, religion, politics, and family views all the way down to subtle issues such as bus routes and sports teams can alter the literary sponsorship of a person.