Mere Rhetoric

James Berlin     Welcome to MR. I’m Mary Hedengren, Jacob is in the Booth and we’re supported by the Humanities Media Project and UT Austin.   Was English in an identity crisis in the 80s and 90s? Maybe. But it’s certain that it thought it was. Interdisciplinary projects such as cultural studies and the voluntary expulsion of groups like English language and composition from English departments was inspiring a lot of ink in the PMLA and other journals and conferences between such illuminaries as Gerald Graff and Stanley Fish. And when people are anxious about who they are, they often look back to how they ended up here. How did English get so weird? What is the background behind composition’s complaints against literary studies? What led to everyone in the department being in a department together?   Enter Professor James Berlin. Berlin, a compositionist who had taught at U of Cinninati and Purdue. Berlin was a disciplinary historian who wrote two important books that tried to create a historical context for