James A. Berlin
Purdue University
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College Composition and Communication | 1988
James A. Berlin
Berlin here continues his unique history of American college com-position begun in his Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Colleges (1984), turning now to the twentieth century.In discussing the variety of rhetorics that have been used in writ-ing classrooms Berlin introduces a taxonomy made up of three cate-gories: objective rhetorics, subjective rhetorics, and transactional rhetorics, which are distinguished by the epistemology on which each is based. He makes clear that these categories are not tied to a chronology but instead are to be found in the English department in one form or another during each decade of the century.His historical treatment includes an examination of the formation of the English department, the founding of the NCTE and its role in writing instruction, the training of teachers of writing, the effects of progressive education on writing instruction, the General Education Movement, the appearance of the CCCC, the impact of Sputnik, and todays literacy crisis.
College English | 1982
James A. Berlin
A number of articles attempting to make sense of the various approaches to teaching composition have recently appeared. While all are worth considering, some promote a common assumption that I am convinced is erroneous.1 Since all pedagogical approaches, it is argued, share a concern for the elements of the composing process-that is, for writer, reality, reader, and language-their only area of disagreement must involve the element or elements that ought to be given the most attention. From this point of view, the composing process is always and everywhere the same because writer, reality, reader, and languageare always and everywhere the same. Differences in teaching theories, then, are mere cavils about which of these features to emphasize in the classroom. I would like to say at the start that I have no quarrel with the elements that these investigators isolate as forming the composing process, and I plan to use them myself. While it is established practice today to speak of the composing process as a recursive activity involving prewriting, writing, and rewriting, it is not difficult to see the writer-reality-audience-language relationship as underlying, at a deeper structural level, each of these three stages. In fact, as I will later show, this deeper structure determines the shape that instruction in prewriting, writing, and rewriting assumes-or does not assume, as is sometimes the case. I do, however, strongly disagree with the contention that the differences in approaches to teaching writing can be explained by attending to the degree of emphasis given to universally defined elements of a universally defined composing process. The differences in these teaching approaches should instead be located in diverging definitions of the composing process itself-that is, in the way the elements that make up the process-writer, reality, audience, and language-are envisioned. Pedagogical theories in writing courses are grounded in rhetorical theories, and rhetorical theories do not differ in the simple undue emphasis of writer or audience or reality or language or some combination of these.
College Composition and Communication | 1986
James A. Berlin
Defining a rhetoric as a social invention arising out of a particular time, place, and set of circumstances, Berlin notes that no rhetoricnot Plato s or Aristotle s or Quintilian s or Perelman sis permanent. At any given time several rhetorics vie for supremacy, with each attracting adherents representing various views of reality expressed through a rhetoric.Traditionally rhetoric has been seen as based on four interacting elements: reality, writer or speaker, audience, and language. As emphasis shifts from one element to another, or as the interaction between elements changes, or as the definitions of the elements change, rhetoric changes. This alters prevailing views on such important questions as what is appearance, what is reality.In this interpretive study Berlin classifies the three 19th-century rhetorics as classical, psychological-epistemological, and romantic, a uniquely American development growing out of the transcendental movement. In each case studying the rhetoric provides insight into society and the beliefs of the people.
Rhetoric Review | 1992
James A. Berlin
The uses of postmodern theory in rhetoric and composition studies have been the object of considerable abuse of late. Figures of some repute in the field-the likes of Maxine Hairston and Peter Elbow-as well as anonymous voices from the Burkean Parlor section of Rhetoric Review-most recently, TS, a graduate student, and KF, a voice speaking for a general English teacher audience (192)-have joined the chorus of protest. The charges have included willful obscurity, selfindulgence, elitism, pomposity, intellectual impoverishment, and a host of related offenses. Although my name usually appears among the accused, I am sympathetic with those undergoing the difficulties of the first encounter with this discussion. (I exclude Professor Hairston in her irresponsible charge that its recent contributors in College English are low-risk Marxists who write very badly [695] and who should be banned from NCTE publications.) I experienced the same frustration when I first encountered the different but closely related language of rhetoric and composition studies some fifteen years ago. I wondered, for example, if I would ever grasp the complexities of Aristotle or Quintilian or Kenneth Burke or I. A. Richards, not to mention the new language of the writing process. A bit later I was introduced to French poststructuralism, and once again I found myself wandering in strange seas, and this time alone. In reading rhetoric, after all, I had the benefit of numerous commentators to help me along-the work of Kinneavy and Lauer and Corbett and Emig, for example. In reading Foucault and Derrida in the late seventies, on the other hand, I was largely on my own since the commentaries were as difficult as the originals, and those few that were readable were often (as even I could see) wrong. Nonetheless, with the help of informal reading groups made up of colleagues and students, I persisted in my efforts to come to terms with this difficult body of thought. I was then, as now, convinced that both rhetorical studies and postmodern speculation offered strikingly convergent and remarkably compelling visions for conducting my life as a teacher and a citizen. It is clear to me that rhetoric and composition studies has arrived as a serious field of study because it has taken into account the best that has been thought and said about its concerns from the past and the present, and I have found that postmodern work in historical and contemporary rhetorical theory has done much to further this effort.
College English | 1985
James A. Berlin
During most of this century, Departments of English in America have paid little attention to the relationship between rhetoric and poetics. With the notable exception of Kenneth Burke, I. A. Richards, and some members of the Chicago School, those who have addressed the issue at all have usually looked upon rhetoric as a subordinate discipline, relegating it to the domain of language in the scientific or rational realms. Poetics is declared the primary business of English studies, constituting the central concern (or even the sole concern) of the department.1 Literary texts thus enjoy a privileged status while rhetorical texts are regarded as meriting little or no attention. This diminution of rhetoric as a discipline worthy of serious study is, however, a historical anomaly of the late nineteenth century. Prior to that period rhetoric was almost invariably considered at least as important as poetics in the education of the young, at all levels of formal training. In this essay I shall explore the process that led to the mutual isolation of rhetoric and poetics, an isolation resulting in the sanctification of poetics and a corresponding denigration of rhetoric. Recognizing the singularity of the contemporary conception of the rhetoricpoetics distinction requires a glance at the relation of the two disciplines in the past. In this case it is best to begin at the beginning, considering the two as they were conceived in the Greece of Aristotle and the Rome of Cicero and Quintilian. I realize that the description to be offered is a simplification, a model of complete balance and harmony more desired than attained at any historical moment, even during the time of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Still this conceptual scheme will provide useful distinctions in considering rhetoric and poetics in nineteenth-century America. In ancient Greece and Rome rhetoric and poetics were commonly defined in relation to each other. As Charles Sears Baldwin indicates in Ancient Rhetoric
College English | 1980
James A. Berlin
DONALD STEWART HAS RECENTLY POINTED OUT the failure of graduate schools of English to offer instruction in the historical development of rhetorical theory, even though most graduate students will later spend at least a part of their professional lives as teachers of writing. 1 His survey of seventy-eight NCTE national convention participants-all products of reputable graduate schools-revealed a shocking lack of knowledge of even the most rudimentary facts about the history of rhetoric. Among the items appearing on Professor Stewarts questionnaire was the name of Richard Whately, a figure who in nineteenth-century America was better known for his Elements of Rhetoric (1828)-written while he was serving as Principal of St. Albans Hall, Oxford-than for his successful tenure as Archbishop of Dublin from 1831 to 1863. It is not surprising, however, that his name is not recognized by writing teachers today. There is not a single article having to do with his rhetoric in any journal devoted to English studies, and even Arthur Applebee in Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History fails to mention him.2 Yet, as Warren Guthrie and Albert Kitzhaber have pointed out, Whatelys Elements was widely used as a writing textbook in American colleges throughout the middle decades of the last century and could even be found in a few college catalogues as late as 1880.3 In this essay I argue that Whately was a significant force in shaping the model for teaching writing which has dominated English departments in America for the last ninety years or so. I must begin, however, by explaining that there were other, equally important voices shaping this model. The most common method of teaching writing today-what has come to be called current-traditional rhetoric-is undergirded by a paradigm, a set of implicit as-
College Composition and Communication | 1981
Glenn J. Broadhead; James A. Berlin
The academic journals are full of articles on the value of generative sentences and sentence combining in the composition classroom.1 Instructors who wish to integrate both techniques into their current teaching strategies may find useful the following step-by-step method of instruction-a method which requires little new technical terminology, and which has been used by many teachers, both experienced and inexperienced, over the last four years. Students learn to write clear sentences with relatively short main clauses, to add details and make interand intra-paragraph transitions by means of a variety of free modifiers, and to use parallel and non-parallel structures meaningfully. All of the material is simple enough to be presented on the blackboard, though dittos are helpful; and teachers may present the material intensively in several class meetings, or else in conjunction with other material (e.g., journal writing, analysis of model essays, discussion of invention and other general rhetorical topics) over twelve or more class periods (one step per class hour). We wish to emphasize that our remarks here are for the most part neither novel nor exhaustive; our intention is simply to show how, within a coherent, traditional framework, students may be led to generate clearer, more efficient, and more imaginative sentences, using sentencecombining exercises to complement the instruction in generating sentences. Step One. Students must first learn to view language as a system of structures; that is, they must become a little more conscious of the structural cues by which they make sense of everyday speech and writing. To this end, instructors may begin by reviewing the traditional, meaning-oriented definitions for the parts of speech, since most college students have encountered these definitions at some point in their schooling. In traditional terms, of course, a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing, a verb shows action or state of being, an adjective modifies a noun, and an adverb modifies a verb. The problem with such definitions is that they do not explain
College English | 1988
James A. Berlin
Archive | 1987
James A. Berlin
College Composition and Communication | 1994
James A. Berlin; Michael J. Vivion