I was doing my prelims readings on Sunday morning. At around noon, I told my roommate I would switch to reading Deborah Brandt’s The Rise of Writing for class: “I’d rather do something with an immediate reward – if I read Brandt, I’d have to write a post, and that gives me a sense of instant reward.” I was unconsciously assigning affective reward to writing, an activity which generates a tangible product. In other words, I saw reading as the input and writing as the output. This turned out to be a very apt start to reading Brandt, who looked at the prominence of writing over reading.

In the readings from previous weeks, we have established that literacy has been perceived as a good or a commodity whose value fluctuates depending on economic or social conditions. Brandt’s intervention adds to and refines our understanding of the value of different literate activities.

When reading Chapter 1, I was struck by how much impersonating effort is involved in workday writing. Speech writers and adoption lawyers try to embody the voices of their clients (25) and army recruitment officers write to embody a “human” voice (26). Brandt frames this labor as “locating the status of authorship in the mind or person of the client/employer” (34). I like the point about how authorship and authority do not necessarily reside in the same person. I looked back on my teaching and thought about the disconnect between the type of writing and the type of I assign. Very often, I assumed that authorship and authority are closely connected, especially in the genre of “personal essay” where the individual writer’s voice is valued.  

Chapter 3 “Occupation: Author” also led me to think more about the relationship between literary writing (which, in Brandt’s words, “enjoys its own prestige”) and other types of writing. I thought reading and writing would be connected in literary writing, unlike the mainstream “cultural dissociation” between reading and writing (e.g. writers are rewarded for responding to literary traditions—something they learn through reading). However, Brandt seems to be suggesting that the disconnect between reading and writing persists even among aspiring “authors.”

Since Brandt studies both those who engage in workaday writing and “literary” work, I want to know how she sees the relationship between the literate and the literary. I happen to be reading Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production, in which he makes observations about the unique polarization in the field of (literary) writing: on the one hand, there is writing produced “for other producers,” and on the other hand, there is writing produced for mass consumption and “bourgeois consecration.” How would an understanding of writing-based literacy affect the literary field?

Finally, I wonder if Brandt’s observation of “writing over reading” holds for working-class Americans. What relationship does the working class have towards reading and writing? How do they experience “authorial residue”? How would a shift to writing-based literacy affect them?