Berlin, Binaries, and the Composition Classroom

I appreciate how Berlin devotes serious time to how a composition might look according to social-epistemic theory. I wonder, though, if Berlin’s hopes have been at least partly fulfilled. In the ten years since Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures was published, I think there has been a concerted effort from teachers to fold in a critique of the various forces (political, economic, cultural) that hail us. First, here’s a reminder of Berlin’s goals for the composition course:

“The course provides students with a set of heuristics—invention strategies—that grow out of the interaction of rhetoric, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, and cultural studies. [. . .] In examining any text—print, film, television—students must locate the key terms in the discourse and situate these terms within the structure of meaning of which they form a part” (125).

Not to pat myself on the back too much, but I believe that I folded in some of these goals in previous courses, long before I ever heard the term social-epistemic, long before I ever read Berlin’s book, long before I knew anything about theory in general. In an English 102 course, the equivalent of the second course in first-year composition (where students read and write analytically, but use literature (fiction, drama, poetry) as primary texts to respond to), I introduced students to binaries. I kept the lecture simple, of course, but I did briefly show how our culture likes to think in terms of “either/or” and that when we think in these terms, we positively valorize one half of the binary (e.g., the male, the self, the heterosexual) while we at the same time negatively valorize the other half (e.g., the female, the other, the gay/alternative sexuality).

This discussion of binaries related directly to one of the units in my ENG 102 course, where we specifically looked at gender, using a variety of texts (Much Ado About Nothing, Pygmalion, Pam Houston’s “How to Talk to a Hunter,” Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t,” etc.). We started the unit by reading John Gray’s evil, reductionist text Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Students are great at spotting the binaries in this text, pointing out the book’s flaws (Gray assumes that all men work and that women stay at home, for instance). Having discussed gender in bifurcated terms, we then turn to the literature, to see the ways in which the works resist simple binaries.

Of course, my composition course did not achieve everything that Berlin advocates. Ultimately, students wrote papers that analyzed the literature, using my framing discussions (gender, feminism, what-have-you) as the impetus for the essays. I never really explored political or economic forces. Thus, I am perhaps guilty of the flaw that Berlin associates with expressionists (though my course was not expressionist): my heart was in the right place (a critique of culture), but my course and syllabus perhaps didn’t go far enough.

I wonder about the rest of us in ENGL 8040. How far have some of you gone towards meeting Berlin's social-epistemic, theory-informed goals?