James A. Berlin and Social-Epistemic Rhetorics

The field of rhetoric and composition has, at last, received a long lost message delivered in the form of Victor J. Vitanza's seminar on James A. Berlin. In this book that is an untext on Berlin's work and its impact on the field, Vitanza acquaints us with Berlin by virtue of many Berlins, in multiplicity, and via the figure of an "excluded third" that wants to deliver to us a new message that was undelivered from Berlin to us, and from Vitanza to Berlin, after Berlin's untimely death in 1994. A seminar on a seminar on the teaching of writing . . . it is teaching all the way down. They met at the historical NEH seminar at Carnegie Mellon in 1978. Their friendship and rhetorical dialogues spanned only sixteen years, but Vitanza continues the conversation through the seminar, through this book (rife with reflections and, yes, homework for his readers), and through our reception of it. It is up to us now to carry it forward. As Vitanza writes, "I would prefer not to not think that what remains unsaid stays undelivered." 

-Cynthia Haynes, author of The Homesick Phonebook: 

Addressing Rhetorics in the Age of Perpetual Conflict



Victor J. Vitanza is Professor Emeritus of English and founding director of the PhD transdisciplinary program in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University. Vitanza is the author of Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (1997) and Sexual Violence in Western Thinking and Writing: Chaste Rape (2011). He has edited and contributed to PRE/TEXT: The First Decade and Writing Histories of Rhetoric, among many other books and journals. He founded PRE/TEXT in 1983 and has been its editor ever since.