In his essay on the four major pedagogical theories, James Berlin admits that his motives are not “disinterested” (“Contemporary” 236): he prefers, he tells us, (and indeed advocates) the theory informing New Rhetoric. But despite his preference, upon first reading the article I found myself favoring Neo-Aristotelian pedagogy, though I could not at first discern, or articulate rather, why that was. Berlin sees two primary flaws with Neo-Aristotelian rhetoric: the first is that it conceptualizes truth or knowledge as being separate from language (245); the second is that it overemphasizes rationality (247). Both, he tells us, restrict the writer and result in him or her being a “passive receptor of the immutably given,” rather than “a creator of meaning,” the latter of which he ascribes to New Rhetoric (247). I disagree. I believe Neo-Aristotelian rhetoric is compatible with modern linguistic scholarship on language/knowledge (albeit, perhaps with a modified Aristotelianism). And if we explore the nature of the enthymeme-example formula a little more closely, I also don’t think that emphasizing the rational restricts the writer. In fact, it is this very emphasis on the enthymeme-example system that I find so appealing in Neo-Aristotelian rhetoric, while I see New Rhetoric, due to its de-emphasis on the rational, as lending itself too close to relativism to make it practical for, say, a freshman composition course.

In “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” James A. Berlin identifies three major rhetorical systems: neo-Aristotelian, current-traditional, and expressivist. To these he adds a fourth: New Rhetoric, which later becomes social-epistemic rhetoric. Social-epistemic rhetoric posits that rather than being something that exists prior to language, knowledge is created by language. While some aspects of other approaches to teaching composition remain useful, only a pedagogy grounded in social-epistemic rhetoric allows students to be agents of transformation, not passive receptacles of information or atomized subjects exploring their own personal truths.