Berlin, James

CompsBerlinRhetorReality
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP. 1987.
“a glance at the Anglo-American experience in university education demonstrates closer to home that rhetoric has continually been an essential feature of college training. In the nineteenth century, for example, instruction in speaking and writing was a principal feature of the college curriculum in America, and until about 1850 the dominanat texts used were three imports from British universities—the works of George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and Richard Whately” (2).
“This history is intended to demonstrate that writing instructionis no less essential for college students. As beginning students encounter an overwhelming array of new ideas and new ways of thinking, the rhetorical training they bring with them inevitably proves—regardless of their intelligence or training—unequal to the task of dealing with their new intellectual experience. It is for this reason that the freshman writing course in college has remained a part of the curriculum throughout the century despite the calls from a small minority for its abolition. . .” (3).
“It is important to keep in mind that as the conception of the real alters—as society or class or group moves from, say, a positivistic to a phenomenological orientation—the roles of interlocutor, audience, and language itself undergo a corresponding alteration (4).
“The plurality of competing rhetorics is always related to the plurality of competing ideologies (5).
“Objective rhetorics are based on a positivistic epistemology asserting that the real is located in the material world. From this perspective, only that which is empirically verifiable or which can be grounded in empirically verifiable phenomena is real” (7).
I’ve never heard this before, but it describes the way in which I see one rhetoric differing from another. Just the facts, only facts as opposed to a rhetoric based on emotional appeals.
“For current-traditional rhetoric, reality is located in the material world” (7-8).
“For now, it should be noted that this rhetoric makes the patterns of arrangement and superficial correctness the main ends of writing instruction. Invention, the focus of Aristotlian rhetoric, need not be taught since the business of the writer is to record careful observations or the reports of fellow observers (in the research paper, for example)” (9).
“Current-traditional rhetoric thus teaches the modes of discourse with a special emphasis on exposition and its forms—analysis, classification, cause-effect, and so forth” (9).
“General Semantics was first offered as a device for propaganda analysis. Semanticist rhetoric focuses on the distortions that are introduced in communication through the misuse of language” (10).
Subjective Theories of Rhetoric
“The most immediate sources of subjective theories for college writing courses during the twenties and thirties are found in the depth psychology of Freud’s American disciples. These theories were further encouraged by the rise of aesthetic expressionism and by the experiments in childhood education conducted by the proponents of progressive education” (12).
“Rhetorics that are gounded in philosophical idealism commonly present a subjective stance” (12).
“The pedagogy encouraged by this rhetorical theory revolves around three central activities, each designed to teach the unteachable by fostering a learning environment that encourages private vision” (14).
Transactional Theories
“Transactional rhetoric is based on an epistemology that sees truth as arising out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation: an interaction of subject and object or of subject and audience or even of all the elements—subject, object audience and language—operating simultaneously” (15).
“Cognitive approaches to rhetoric grew out of the psychological studies of such figures as Jerome Bruner and Jean Paget. The epistemology of these rhetorics assumes a correspondence between the structure of the mind and the structures of nature” (16).
End Chapter ONE
Chapter 2—The Nineteenth-Century Background
“The devalorizing of the writing course in the curriculum was the result of the convergence of a remarkably complex set of forces” (21).
“The “new” university had arisen to provide an agency for certifying the members of the new professions, professions that an expanding economy had created” (21).
“The old university had been elitist and had prepared students of means and status for three major professions: law, medicine, and the church. The new university encouraged a meritocracy, opening its doors to anyone who could meet the entrance requirements (a growing number, due to the new free high schools), offering upward mobility through certification in such professions as agriculture, engineering, journalism, social work, education and a host of other new professional pursuits” (21).
“This bias against classical rhetoric in fact became a standard feature of the English department—with the single exception of Charles Sears Baldwin’s work—that continued until the 1950’s” (22).
[This was due to the monumental task of correcting papers—like 20 teachers working with 2,000 students.]
“The fall from grace of the college rhetoric course was thus the result of the convergence of a number of elements. The attempt to improve the status of English department members, the establishment of the study of English literature in the college curriculum, the shift in the language of learning in college, the new entrance exams in English and even the establishment of the new public high school all played a part in changing the nature of writing instruction in colleges” (24).
“No groupof entering students—not Harvard’s or Columbia’s or Michigan’s or Stanford’s—has ever been able to manage the rhetorical tasks required in college without the college providing instruction in writing” (25).
“Their distinguishing feature—and here I am relying on Kenneth Burke’s “Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy” as well as on Todorov—is that rhetoric is concerned with symbolic action in the material world, with practical consequences as an end, while poetic is concerned with symbolic action for itself, with contemplation of the text for its own sake” (26).
Chapter 3—The Growth of the Discipline—1900-1920
“The most important single even marking English studies as secure in the college curriculum of the new university was the establishment of the Modern Language Association in 1883. The most important event for maintaining the discipline’s commitment to students was the appearance of the National Council of Teachers of English in 1911” (32).
“The colleges were determining the high school English curriculum at a time when only a small percentage of high school students went on to college—only four percent of those from eighteen to twenty-one years old (Rudolph, Curriculum 155)” (33).
Now we teach to tests.
“Three major approaches to the teaching of writing appeared between 1900 and 1920. The oldest was what is now known as current-traditional rhetoric. . . . This rhetoric, positiveistic and practical in spirit was designed to provide the new middle-class professionals with the tools to avoid embarrassing themselves in print”
Its principal rival in the East was the rhetoric of liberal culture, advanced at such schools as Yale, Princeton, and Williams. This rhetoric was elitist and aristocratic, contending that the aims of writing instruction in the English department ought to be to encourage those few students who possessed genius”
Finally the third major approach to writing instruction emphasized writing as training for participation in the democratic process—a rhetoric of public discours” ((35).
Transactional Rhetoric
“Scott’s rhetoric was consciously formulated as an alternative to current-traditional rhetoric, especially to the later’s emphasis on the scientific and the practical in rhetorical discourse” (47).
Reality for transactional rhetoric, “It is instead the result of the interaction between the experience of the external world and what the perceiver brings to this experience. The transactional relationship that defines reality also includes the social, the interaction of humans” (48-49).
The Ideas Approach
“A related transactional approach to writing that also grew out of progressive education’s interest in connecting learning to social and political life was found in the “ideas course,” also called the “though course” or “content course” (51).
“As Cremin and Clarence Karier have indicated, before World War I the emphasis of the progressives was on social reform, on bringing the school closer to serving the needs of society” (60).
Where we are still—culture—ideals, etc.
Chapter 6—The Renaissance of Rhetoric 1960—1975
“The most crucial events for the fate of writing instruction during the sixties and seventies were the intensification of the Cold War and changes in economic social, and political arrangements that resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of students attending college. The space race signaled by the launching of Sputnik in 1957 eventually led to federal funds being invested in the teaching of literature and composition for the first time in American history” (120).
“Jerome Bruner, a Harvard psychologist, was an important but largely unacknowledged source of the process models of composing that are now a commonplace of our intellectual environment” (122).
“Bruner introduced the language of cognitive psychology including the influence of Piaget, to education circles. His emphasis was on learning as a “process”, a concept that had been an important part of progressive education (and, as indicated earlier, an emphasis of some writing teachers in the twenties and after)” (122).
“The implications of Bruner’s thought for writing instruction are clear: Students should engage in the process of composing, not in the study of someone else’s process of composing” (123).