Maggie asks:

"Early on in the first chapter he brings up the fact that poetics and rhetoric are always vying for the position of "top dog" in the English department. What I would like to find out is why?"

I think Berlin's suggestion is that there's never really been a competition, then or now. In the past, rhetoric and the poetic were intertwined. For the past one hundred twenty-five years or so, the poetic has been "top dog." There's been no competition. Berlin says, "My argument here is that changes in economic and social structures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a new conception of the poetic, a conception that defines the aesthetic experience in class terms while isolating it from other spheres of human activity [. . .]" (4) Berlin marks a change where a growing bourgeoisie coincided with changes in education (the move from a liberal arts, church oriented education to a specialized, elective-centered education). With this change, a new configuration of the poetic emerged, and rhetoric--ever since--has seemed somehow has less important.

Maggie's question is still important, since these biases (I had a literature professor at my MA program state, outright, that literature dealt with, well, literature, while comp dealt with essays) still exist. The irony, of course, is that English departments are often the largest departments on campus because of composition.