According to James Paul Gee, literacy in a “dominant secondary Discourse” brings “social goods” (8). In Success, Victims, and Prodigies: “Master” and “Little” Cultural narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre, Kara Poe Alexander writes how the success narrative can also show that literacy can bring “social goods”. “It promotes the idea that anyone–  no matter their social background– can move up in status, income, reputation, and self-esteem” (Alexander 610). These ways of moving up in life are different examples of social goods. Through literacy (all of the various stories behind the success narratives) one is able to step up the ladder in life, to be able to get some sort of social gain from their experience or skills due to literacy. In Sponsors of Literacy, Brandt discusses how “the most pressing issues we deal with– tightening associations between literate skill and social viability, the breakneck pace of change in communications technology, persistent inequities in access and reward- all relate to structural conditions in literacy’s bigger picture” (556). In other words, this is the “bigger picture” of the social and economic conditions that shape literacy for each individual. Social and economic conditions shape individual literacy through sponsors of literacy. Sponsors are those that help someone with their literacy skills. Typically, sponsors tend to get something in return (e.g. “social goods”); they gain some sort of advantage in some way whether it be in social class or even pride. At first, while I was reading literacy narratives from the Rising Cairn page, I did not notice any sponsors or agents in each individual narrative. But after reading Brandt’s Sponsors of Literacy, there were many sponsors all throughout. Some even seemed to be not prominently held to the reader’s eyes, but they were there. Bringing about sponsors opens up a new way of looking at literacy narratives, giving a new way to classify and analyze them. Was this person able to achieve literacy on their own? Did someone help them along their way during this story? For what reasons would this sponsor help the author? What could they gain? Sponsors open up a new way to find the reasoning behind the accomplishments of each author. Though there is all of this talk about literacy bringing social goods, literacy can also bring about bad experiences. For example, in Alexander’s publication, she talks about how the second most written about cultural narrative (next to the success narrative) is the victim narrative. This narrative occurred in over 80% of the sample students’ narratives at least once. The victim narrative is a telling of a bad experience with literacy which causes the victim to cast blame on someone who “took the fun” out of reading and writing. This type of narrative was mainly written by students who were “socioeconomically and educationally privileged” (Alexander 617). It seems to be strange how those who are more well off tend to feel more like a victim; the ones who already have plentiful social goods are the ones asking for more.

When you first read the two tales of Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez, you could say that they both would fit the literacy success story cultural narrative. For Raymond, his literacy acquisition started young when he fooled around with computers at his father’s computer programming company. He built his way up to graduate from his local university to become a successful freelance writer of software and software documentation. Raymond’s story emphasizes literacy more than himself. He grew up goofing around with computers and going to software stores, learning the material and how everything worked; eventually getting an education where he could put all of this knowledge to use. For Dora, she started and grew up from almost nothing. Not even her brother knew how to write or read Spanish, and she had to teach herself. She worked her way up to graduate from college and go on to be successful. The two people grew up in the same town and attended the same university as her. But Brandt goes on to say “one might be tempted to say that Raymond Branch was born at the right time and lived in the right place– except that the experience of Dora Lopez troubles that thought” (561). Which is very true, in Dora’s case, she grew up in a very troubled environment with a not-so-well-off family. She was a minority while Raymond was a white male with a family that had more money. Dora had to reach further just to grasp quality material and education for her to be able to better herself. Dora’s story could instead be seen as either a hero cultural narrative or even an outsider narrative. In Dora’s case, it could be seen as a hero cultural narrative because it more emphasizes her than literacy. It emphasizes her struggles in order to achieve literacy and improving her reading and writing skills, something that the success narrative says specifically that it does not emphasize.

In A Mother Knows Best by Sarah Robinson, Sara’s mother acts as her sponsor of literacy. Her mother encourages and supports her to read more, and more advanced books as she gets older. Though Sarah may not want to move on from the books that she loves, her mom acts as a sponsor by taking away the books that are too easy for her, replacing them with higher level books that are harder for her to read, teaching her that in order to move up and get ahead, one must challenge himself. In My Mom Prepared Me for the World by Alexis Ouellette, her mother also acts as Alexis’s sponsor of literacy. In this literacy narrative, Alexis’s mother read her favorite book The Little Match Girl when she was young. Later in her life, her mother would read it more and more often, but then her grandfather died. Her mother still read the book to her to help her better cope; before and after she had read the book to prepare her and get her comfortable with the idea of death and how to cope with the loss. This sponsor of literacy may complicate Brandt’s claims of what a sponsor is. Brandt defines a sponsor of literacy as “agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy– and gain an advantage by it in some way.” But this story with Alexis’s mother, it does not seem as though there is a personal advantage to helping Alexis cope. Could the advantage be the happiness of spending time with her daughter? In A Mother Knows Best would her sponsor’s gain be a smarter daughter and the pride that may come with it?