DISCIPLINARITY AND POLITICS: JAMES BERLIN AND THE POLITICAL TURN IN COMPOSITION

Abstract

ABSTRACT The recent publication of Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity (2018)—a collection of essays addressing what the editors refer to as the “disciplinarity problem”—signals the return of a perennial concern in the field of rhetoric-composition studies. Contributors to this collection refer to a multitude of “turns” representing divergent interests that pull against desires to establish and maintain a more unified disciplinarity. These tensions seem most intense for “turns” focused on political agendas, such as “the public,” “the global,” and “the queer.” Interestingly, the idea of “turns” has also recently received field-wide attention as indicated not only in Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity, but also in a special issue of College English dedicated to “Reimagining the Social Turn” (2014). Contributors to that issue, as well as later respondents, have argued over the political origins and nature of the so-called “social turn,” again highlighting the tension between desires for a well-defined discipline and a kind of disciplinary fluidity (if not anti-disciplinarity) constantly reshaped by shifting political concerns. This dissertation enters these recent discussions on “disciplinarity” and “the social turn,” making the case that rhetoric-composition studies still struggles with disciplinarity because, in part, the field has overlooked the presence of a political turn in the midst of what is now called “the social turn.” More specifically, the dissertation argues that the adoption of the phrase social turn may obfuscate an explicitly focused “political turn” that dominated the field during the period of 1987-1993, a turn largely enabled by James Berlin’s efforts to politicize composition classes and, thereby, the discipline of rhetoric and composition studies. Thus, by elucidating this “political turn,” the dissertation complicates recent histories of composition studies; moreover, it suggests that current discussions of the field’s disciplinarity have been hampered by this incomplete understanding of its recent history.