Critical Expressivism- Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom, 2014a

John Watson Is to Introspectionism as James Berlin Is to Expressivism
homes, climbing on top of desks in schoolrooms, walking out of cubicles in
office buildings, stepping from cars in the rat maze of suburban sprawl—all of
us standing to boldly speaking the sum of our thoughts and feelings, our consciousness,
our mind. The fact that no one would listen would be irrelevant. We
would be rising from the carnage, asserting that Watson had won the battle but
not the war, that we would not be controlled, that mind mattered.
I knew the image teetered on the edge of insanity, but it made me feel better,
so I let it linger. I was looking around me, wondering if the gentleman at the
table next to me, texting with one hand and tapping the mouse of his computer
with the other hand, would be willing to introspect as a subversive act. I suspected
not. Who would join me? I ran through my list of family and friends.
As a graduate student, I had so few friends left that I skipped directly to leading
figures in the field of composition studies I’d been living with for the past years.
Peter Elbow? Definitely. Donald Murray? To be sure. Jane Emig? Hell, yeah!
James Berlin? Pshaw. Never in a million years.
That’s when it hit me—my thesis, the result of my hours of scholarly research:
James Berlin was a behaviorist. James Berlin was a behaviorist? The words
were so entirely absurd that they couldn’t possibly have come from me. They
must have infected me from without, and the only way to rid myself of them was
to figure out what they meant. It was either that, or start embroidering National
Day of Introspection t-shirts.
THE “EXPRESSIONISTS” AS INTROSPECTIONISTS
I was proceeding with a working thesis—James Berlin was a behaviorist—
which I almost completely rejected. Without a doubt, James Berlin would have
shared Professor MacDougall’s distress at the exercise of power at the expense
of human interest. Ira Shor’s pedagogy, which Berlin admiringly describes in
“Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” (1988), is based in a rejection of
the consumerist culture that Watson helped create through his work in advertising.
Berlin’s work is suffused with an ethical sensibility completely lacking from
Watson’s.
Still, something felt true about my fantastical thesis. I backed up to the most
reasonable image in my research-induced fantasy: the picture of Elbow, Murray,
and Emig, publicly and subversively introspecting with me. This part of my
daydream proved both simple and supportable: Elbow, Murray, and Emig were,
in some important way, like Titchener. The comparison held up when I placed a
passage from Titchener’s psychologoy textbook next to a passage from Murray’s
1970 article, “The Interior View: One Writer’s View of Composition”:
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