Jonathan Berliner

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at Los Angeles Valley College

William Faulkner and the Materials of Writing examines the many physical texts in Faulkner's novels and stories from letters and telegrams to Bibles, billboards, and even the alphabetic shape of airport runways. Current investigations in print culture, book history, and media studies often emphasize the controlling power of technological form; inst...

In July 1892, the People’s Party held its first political convention in Omaha, Nebraska. Although the candidate nominated by the party, General James B. Weaver, placed far behind the major party candidates, the Party platform included a number of reforms that were adopted in the United States over the next generation: direct election of senators, a...

This essay examines Barack Obama's rhetoric during the 2008 presidential campaign. I argue that the use of metaphoric roads and landscapes in his speeches helped Obama to create a diverse political coalition by depicting the citizenry traveling together on a shared American journey. Such language also enabled Obama to bring together a range of poli...

Simon Pokagon's writings exemplify a complex process of linguistic-material worldmaking. His birch-bark booklets bring together multiple cultural traditions, including nineteenth-century tourist art, traditional Algonquian writing, and a long history of writing on bark that dates to the early history of writing itself. Neither purely things nor pur...

In February 1907, after months of unsuccessful wrangling with a conservative Congress unwilling to pass his reform legislation, President Theodore Roosevelt decided to grant an interview to Edward B. Clark of the Chicago Evening Post. The topic of the interview, however, was neither the president's proposed legislation nor the developing economic c...