Composition Forum 36 - Summer 2017 - Textual Encounters in the DALN

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by jay

Composition Forum 36 (Summer 2017) features Mary Soliday’s study of how narrators in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) link reading and writing desires to specific past “textual encounters.” Across home, school, and personal memory, books operate as sensual objects, shared performances, and social bridges that memorialize relationships while revealing competing literate selves. The DALN is framed as a model for democratic learning spaces where dynamic encounters with texts can unfold.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages4

Reading Time6 min

AccessFree to download

Composition Forum 36, Summer 2017

Textual Encounters in the DALN

Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 36, Summer 2017 Textual Encounters in the DALN / Composition Forum on the DALN Mary Soliday Browsing through the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), I was surprised by how frequently the narrators attributed their desire to read and write in the present with specific textual encounters they had had in the past. In these encounters, the text (often a literary text) helped narrators to mediate relationships: in these tales, genuine literacy emerges from genuine social connection. Narrators sometimes focus their encounters by dwelling on the text as a sensual object or visual image, or by describing a moment of shared performance, storytelling, and reading aloud. Narrators then use these encounters to memorialize their connections to others but also to acknowledge the complexity of past literate selves. Through these textual encounters, the narrators endow private emotional moments with broader public meaning. For some, the private encounter spurs them to pass on their habits and their books to others in their immediate circle. For others, the private encounter widens the circle as narrators hold competing literacies in equal tension. Ultimately, the DALN offers to me—to writing teachers—the desire to create democratic spaces where dynamic textual encounters can occur. At home, encounters with texts embed literacy within the intensity of family experience and serve to memorialize family relationships. Often acting as literacy sponsors in these tales, mothers make powerful use of reading aloud. After a day at the library, Natalie Szymanski recalls how she waited for the intimate experience of her mother reading the new books to her on the city bus. Cheryl Harris remembers the textual encounters her mother mediated in her childhood: reciting poetry by James Russell Lowell or reading the Little Golden Books aloud. Dads are not wholly absent: Georgia State physics major John Allen recalls, for example, that when he couldn’t read by second grade, his dad read aloud to him from Harry Potter and launched him into literacy. The narrators cannot disentangle the text from the encounter: as a practice, literacy is drenched with the memory of being related to a particular other at a particular moment in time. In school, print texts, and especially literature, also connect narrators to their peers and help narrators to memorialize friendships. When Chelsea Geary moved to a new school in Santa Clara, California, she felt an unexpected surge of pleasure and kinship in an alien environment the moment she saw a girl reading a Tracy Brown novel. In the present, Geary writes, the mere sight of the physical text of a Brown novel still evokes this past friendship “made through her book.” Heavily annotated and now missing its cover, Leaves of Grass—poetry to which his high school English teacher introduced him—still sits on Wesley Stevenson’s shelf. Whitman’s book memorializes Stevenson’s potential desire to be a writer. That desire was entangled with Stevenson’s friendship in school with Molly and Kristin, whose poems he includes in his account; “poetry,” Stevenson writes,“open[ed] me and my relationships with others.” DALN narrators sometimes evoke the book as a sensual object that arouses emotion and that, in turn, provokes the author to memorialize an earlier literate self. Gabriella Smith opens her tale of falling in love with Dickens by describing the intense physical presence of A Tale of Two Cities: “I crack open an ordinary hardcover book and smell the wear of years, the distinct fragrance of old books that I can’t explain, and the scent of time and worn pages. I finger its cover, rough and royal blue with a smooth brown spine and gilded, golden letters on the front and side”(1) . Like Smith, DALN narrators often suggest that in the present they seek to craft a sense of the past s

FAQs

What does Soliday focus on regarding literacy in DALN?

Soliday examines how narrators repeatedly connect their present desire to read and write with specific past encounters with texts recorded in the DALN.

How do textual encounters function at home in these narratives?

At home, texts embed literacy within family experience, often through reading aloud and shared moments that memorialize relationships and preserve private memory.

How does DALN extend beyond private memory for writers and teachers?

Soliday presents DALN as creating democratic spaces for dynamic textual encounters, helping writing teachers foster meaningful, socially grounded literacy experiences.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by jay