Rhetoric and Reality: questions and stories

This week’s readings in 601 include the first half of Berlin’s book and also essays/chapters by Sharon Crowley, Bob Connors, and John Brereton. All three fit in nicely with Berlin’s book, but they provide different perspectives, remixes, or departures from Berlin’s overview. A thread I’m trying to pull through is about the histories, theories and practices behind modern composition, but also questions about how history gets written (historiography). Why have we told these stories they way we’ve told them? What are our historical narratives and their major plots (what Hayden White would call modes of emplotment)?

Why do we locate Harvard as the originary narrative? Harvard is all over the place. What are the costs and benefits of telling the Harvard story as one of our main stories?

What is the difference between writing a history of the discipline that is based on the rise of the freshman English course vs. a history that accounts for changing literacy practices and the changing demands of literacy (whether academic literacy or other types of literacies)?

Labor is a central theme in the readings. How is the status of the field related to the status of those who labor in the fields of “freshman English”? What are the major narratives about labor and composition and rhetoric’s status? How do those narratives create a particular psychology and set of moral and ethical claims for the field? What might be the other narratives about labor and status that are currently missing? Where might we look to find those narratives?

Which brings me to another question: What counts as evidence in these histories? What are the major sources drawn upon?

It's hard to not see the "great man" theory operating in these histories, a veritable who's who of white male faculty figures. While there is no refuting that the university was a male dominated place until of late, how can one rethink the locations and spaces of the history of the field to better account for gender and race? (next week's readings will help us do that, too).

Since we are reading _Rhetoric and Reality_, I will share a story.

Rhetoric and Reality: Meeting Jim

James Berlin came on the greyhound bus from West Lafayette to visit the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in February of 1993. It was six years after he published Rhetoric and Reality, and he came to give a talk about a new book he was writing on cultural studies and composition. We were happy to hear about Jim’s newer work, but what we all wanted to talk about was Rhetoric and Reality. My fellow graduate students and I had read Rhetoric and Reality many times over. It was and still is a sheer rock cliff of a history that we scaled in our seminars, feeling a sense of triumph after we’d mastered (or tried to master) the parade of dates, names, institutions, and categories. We simply referred to the book by the author: “Berlin.” I’ve been rereading “Berlin,” someone would intone, and he… “ Or in a seminar someone would say, “Berlin argues that….” Everyone would pause. Rhetoric and Reality carried weight with us. It was on everyone’s exam list and dissertation bibliography.

As is the case when any personage visits a graduate program, we steeled ourselves for what we might expect. Would Jim be stuffy? Tweedy? Pompous? Angry? Polemical? Condescending? Touchy-feely (nah, we knew he wouldn’t be that). Would he diss us? I was excited because Jim and I shared a passion for Marxist theories. Granted, I was more interested in socialist feminisms and materialist feminisms, but I felt a kindredship with his orientation toward historical materialism.

We quickly saw that Jim was disciplined and passionate about ideas, but easy going. A real person. His visit to Milwaukee included a lot of visits to restaurants and smoky bars with graduate students and assorted faculty. He was fun to be around. He wasn’t serious or stuffy; he joked a lot, and I gave him a hard time for telling a sexist joke one night. He was gracious about getting a feminist upbraiding. I liked him even more. We talked about Maxine Hairston’s critique of his work in her infamous essay “Diversity and Ideology.” He seemed truly hurt by Maxine’s characterization of his work.

Jim ran while visiting us in Milwaukee, making his way through the icy streets near Lake Michigan. I was impressed that he ran 5 miles almost everyday, especially in the midst of a Midwest winter.

Running, taking the Greyhound, hanging out in smoky bars. We could relate to him. We were sorry when he got back on the Greyhound and went back to Purdue.

Jim collapsed and had a heart attack about a year after he visited us in Milwaukee. He had just come home after one of his daily runs. At Virginia Tech where I was a new assistant professor, my colleague Mike Fainter came into my office that day and casually mentioned that someone named Jim Berlin had passed away. I was sitting there with a graduate student. I asked Mike if it was true. He said it was and that the news of Jim’s death was on a national listserv.

“Did you know him?” Mike asked.

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move for a while, but eventually I nodded. The graduate student I was meeting with excused herself, Mike went down the hall to tell other faculty, and my office mate shut the door so I could be alone. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t think any of us who met Jim or were fortunate enough to work with him could believe it. It just didn’t seem possible. Jim had a book to finish, dissertations to direct, conference papers to write and read, graduate students to meet and influence, and many miles to run.

There’s a fun run and pub crawl at CCCC every year in honor of Jim. It’s a good event, a good chance to stretch the legs after being shut away in the carpeted rooms of the Hilton or the Hyatt. After the run, participants gather at a local pub to enjoy a beer and conversation. People often tell Jim stories, and there is a lot of laughter. One of my favorite stories is about Jim writing his conference papers on airplanes. He would emerge from a flight with a yellow legal pad, his paper scrawled in longhand. The paper would always make sense, and he’d be ready to have a good time at the conference, attending sessions and staying up late while others sweated over their papers in their hotel rooms.

For a long time (and arguably still to this day), Jim’s book Rhetoric and Reality defined the conversation about rhetorical history for many of us in the field. After reading Berlin, most of us eventually read Kitzhaber’s dissertation If you read Kitzhaber, you see how indebted Jim is to that initial dissertation project. There have been critiques and revisions of Jim’s thesis in Rhetoric and Reality and different histories produced, but the book is still a standard must read—a good place to start to make sense of how the first-year course developed and how the field developed alongside the course.