James Berlin

James Berlin was a leading figure in the field of rhetoric and composition, and in the cultural studies movement within composition. He believed passionately in social justice and considered his work—both as a teacher and a theorist—to be part of a larger social mission toward creating a true American democracy, where every citizen could participate fully and share power equally. The composition classroom, he believed, was the logical site for working toward that goal. He taught composition at Wichita State University starting in 1975, directed the Freshman English program at the University of Cincinnati from 1981–1985, and served as English professor at Purdue University from 1987–1994. He published three influential books: Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (1984), Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges 1900–1985 (1987), and Rhetoric, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring English Studies (1996; 2003), co-edited the major collection Cultural Studies in the English Classroom (1993), and published numerous articles in College English, Pre/Text, and other composition journals. Early in his career, he developed what would become an influential analysis of the “rhetorics” at work in composition pedagogy. These include the current-traditionalist approach—evident in the majority of available textbooks—the individually centered expressivist approach, and the cognitive process movement. Berlin argues that a social rhetoric—what he defines as the “social epistemic” approach—offers the most effective means for teaching composition because it acknowledges the contingent nature of knowledge. Rhetoric, as Berlin writes in his 1988 “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” ¹ is “a political act involving a dialectical interaction engaging the material, the social, and the individual writer, with language as the agency of mediation” (488). In his final book, published posthumously in 1996 with a second edition issued in 2003, ² Berlin argues for a thoroughgoing revision of English studies based in social epistemic rhetoric, a revision that would erase the boundary between poetics and rhetoric. The book situates Berlin’s work amid the ongoing debates about rhetoric and composition, illustrating continuing influence in the field.