Composition: History & Theory: 1900 - 1919
Transactional Rhetoric
Description
In Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 (1987), James Berlin touches on transactional rhetoric (which was an early approximation of the epistemic position). This rhetoric functioned to illuminate the idea that there is a relation between the experience of the external word and what the perceiver brings to the experience. Therefore, language and writing is experience and “to deny the validity of a person’s dialect is to deny the reality of that person’s experience and, finally, the reality of the person herself” (48).
Date of Upload
3/13/09