Rhetoric and Reality – About

In response to 2016/2017 being the 30th anniversary of Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality, we have created an online discussion blog where each month an invited scholar, from a wide array of subfields in our field, will post to the forum, offering their comments and reflections. Our first respondent is Terese Monberg, from Michigan State University. She has just posted an initial response, and we hope you will consider responding and engaging in a larger scholarly dialogue about Berlin’s text. In future months, the respondents will include Asao Inoue (December), Jason Palmeri (January), Carolyn Calhoun (February), Carmen Kynard (March), and Bruce McComiskey (April).

I should add that the goal here is not to further canonize or rehearse critiques of this book, but to use Berlin’s text as a starting point to talk about the future work of the field and of SWR. Possible questions for consideration in these responses include, but are not limited to: if Berlin’s text announced a set of concerns for the 1980’s, what are the primary concerns for today? And how might (or might not) Berlin’s text be useful to such work? How might these new concerns should be part of the SWR series? In what format (print/digital) might these concerns be taken up.

If you are interested in participating, please click here to join the conversation. (Dependent upon the success and usability of this new feature, the format and process for commenting may change in the future.)

Please contact C.C. Hendricks at crhen100@syr.edu or Brett Keegan at bekeegan@syr.edu if you have any questions.