“I Shall, with the Greatest of Ease and Friendliness, Scour You from the Earth”: Yvor Winters on Kenneth Burke

By David Beard, University of Minnesota–Duluth

Winters, Yvor.  In Defense of Reason.  Athens, OH:  Swallow Press, 1987.

———.   Selected Letters of Yvor Winters.  Ed. R. L. Barth.  Athens, OH:  Swallow Press, 2000.

Introduction

It was Fredric Jameson who introduced Yvor Winters into the study of Burke in a serious way, precisely because he believed that Winters corrected a serious deficiency in Burke’s work.  In “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis,” Jameson articulated what he believed to be a central purpose of criticism:  to tell and to analyze “the narrative of that implacable yet also emancipatory logic whereby the human community has evolved into its present form and developed the sign systems by which we live and explain our lives to ourselves.”  In Jameson’s view, Burke was innovative in that he saw the centrality of symbol systems but failed insofar as he “did not want to teach us history” (523).  The Burke that Jameson here refers to, primarily, is dramatism.  Dramatism left, in Jameson’s view, no place for the negative hermeneutic, for the subconscious and for the ideological analysis of the subconscious. 

We can argue whether Jameson’s reading of Burke is incomplete.  Certainly, if Burke himself faced these deficiencies or limits in his own work, the work of three generations of Burkeans since then has corrected this lack.  That said, however, Jameson himself offered a corrective to this tendency in Burke in the writings of Yvor Winters.  He called Winters’ “Experimental School in American Poetry” a corrective to Burke’s “Lexicon Rhetoricae” in that it historicized Burke’s conceptual scheme – it historicized those terms that Burke had located primarily in psychology.

Jameson was not the first person to see connection between Burke and Winters.  Alan Stephens used Burke (among other critical frames) to evaluate “The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters” more than 40 years ago.  And any assessment of the New Criticism from 1939 forward regarded Burke and Winters as stars within that night sky (Wellek, Kazin, de Mordaunt, Robertson, Calhoun, Krieger, and so many more).  In those analyses, Winters is often praised for his synthesis of “formal analysis with a study of American ethical traditions,” where Burke is celebrated for his “analysis of psychological and political forms” (Zabel 424).  The distinction between Burke and Winters in terms of the historicizing impulse is reiterated in those assessments, but without Jameson’s Marxist turn.

Yet a full exploration of Burke and Winters beyond their status as contemporaries affiliated with the same literary critical movement has yet to be engaged.  This review essay takes a brief look at two resources on Winters (In Defense of Reason and the Selected Letters) for some greater intimation of Burke and Winters as interlocutors.  Further, it opens a door to a critically understudied part of Burke’s intellectual work. 

 

In Defense of Reason

Winters’ most sustained grappling with Burke can be found in the 1937 book Primitivism and Decadence, reprinted in the 1987 volume In Defense of Reason.  The chapter titled “Experimental School in American Thought” is a sustained engagement both with Counter-Statement and with Towards a Better Life. Winters chides Burke for insisting upon a rupture between the psychology of the characters and the psychology of the audience in fiction.  For Winters, the psychology of the characters is a vehicle for “controlling the attitude of the audience” (Defense 36) and so is intimately tied to what Burke calls the psychology of the audience.  This is an important theoretical move.  

Winters criticizes Burke’s interpretation of other literature.  For example, he finds Burke’s reading of Hamlet rooted in “qualitative progression,” limited precisely because it ignores the psychology of the hero – what Winters believes is essential to understanding “narrative logic” (Defense 59). 

Winters’ rereading of Burke’s lexicon is not only a theoretical contribution;  it is—in part, at least—invective.  Winters cuts to the bone by using Burke’s novel, Towards a Better Life, to make his point:  he declares TBL “duller than Thackeray” and dismisses the novel because he believes that Burke’s primary goal in writing Life is to become “quotable” (Defense 37).  He finds Burke’s novel to be weak precisely because it avoids concern with the psychology of character.  Instead, Winters claims that Burke “expends his entire rhetorical energy on his sentences, but lets his story run loose through the mind of his hero” – as a result, Winters declares “the form careless and confused” (“Experimental School” 64).  Towards a Better Life was, at best, a minor work of Modern literature.  It is not exactly clear how it warranted serving as a foil for Winters’ critical statements on narrative logic. But examining the recently published volume of Winters’ letters may help. 

 

Selected Letters

Winters’ Selected Letters (2000) reveals that Winters was a careful reader of the journals that advanced Modernism.  For example, in a 1923 letter to Monroe Wheeler, he calls William Carlos Williams’ prose in Broom “beautiful” but calls a story by Burke in Broom “marred by a certain Wyndham Lewis swash” (Letters 62).  It was through these journals that he became aware of Burke’s writings.

Winters comments on Burke’s critical writings as well.  In a letter to Tate, he admits that Counter-Statement “is a tremendously brilliant book, but basically a vicious one” and enumerates a half-dozen reasons for its defects.  In a later letter to Lincoln Kirstein, he offers systematic elaboration of his criticisms.  For example, he dislikes the prose style:  he feels that Burke should “repress his personality a little … and reduce his book by fifty pages and thereby render it incomparably more clear.”  He questions Burke’s grammar, noting awkward constructions like “I found I must eat rather than drinking.”  More bitingly, Winters finds that, in Counter-Statement, “his clearest ideas are slight;  his attempts at handling serious ideas are confused” (Letters 199–200)

Winters also comments in his letters on Burke’s creative writings.  He tells Allen Tate that “Burke’s novel is as feeble a mess as Cowley’s poetry.  It really is contemptible” (Letters 185).  He tells Lincoln Kirstein that “the plot in Burke’s novel is perfectly meaningless, a thin excuse for calling it a novel” (Letters 198). 

All of this is fine and good, largely because it reiterates what we see of Burke in Winters’ published writings.  In these letters, we can see his criticisms of Towards a Better Life coalesce;  we see his response to Counter-Statement in its early formations. 

What the letters add that the published writings do not is a sense of his bile, rising against Burke as an editor.  In 1923, while Burke was an editor at the Dial, Burke rejected some of Winters’ poems, so Winters wrote to Burke with a rebuttal.  In that letter, dated 5 June 1923, Winters claims that Burke “outrageously fail[ed] to appreciate [the poems] at their just and rather considerable value.”  He accuses Burke of incompletely reading or failing to understand Winters’ own Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image (Letters 64).  He then proceeds to educate Burke on what he should have learned from the monograph, closing the letter with a back-handed compliment:  “You are undoubtedly a man of remarkable mentality, but I feel that you are, at times, misguided;  and unless you mend your ways, and that at an early date, I shall, with the greatest of ease and the greatest of friendliness, scour you from the earth” (Letters 66).  The anger is clear.

Winters’ anger against Burke becomes more vitriolic, and in his letters, his disdain for Burke becomes a trope for criticizing others.  When dismissing Thayer’s skills as an editor, Winters’ claims that “when Burke was stealing Thayer’s ideas, he must have cleaned him out” (letter to Allen Tate, Letters 104).  Can we separate this level of anger against Burke from Winters’ criticisms of Towards a Better Life?

 

Conclusion 

This brief essay is by no means an exhaustive look at Burke and Winters as contemporaries.  It does, however, build upon the work begun by Jack Selzer and Ann George (and others) to more fully contextualize Burke among the Moderns.  And it points to a part of that interaction that is as yet invisible:  the role that Burke’s work as editor played not only in shaping his own critical thought but in shaping responses to his work.  It is as yet unclear whether Winters’ vehement criticisms of Burke were rooted, in part, in his declared intent to “scour” Burke from the Earth.  But a closer look at the Selected Letters and at In Defense of Reason raises that question, and potentially others, for Burke criticism. 

Works Cited

Calhoun, Richard James.  “The New Criticism Ten Years After.”  South Atlantic Bulletin 26.2 (Nov. 1960): 1–6.

de Mordaunt, Walter J.  “The Application of Modern Criticism to College Literature Courses.” Peabody Journal of Education 37.2 (Sep. 1959): 113–16.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis.”  Critical Inquiry 4.3 (Spring 1978):  507–524. 

Kazin, Alfred.  “Whatever Happened to Criticism?”  The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 5.2 (1972): 10–20.

Krieger, Murray.  “The School of Criticism and Theory: An Allegorical History.”  New Literary History. 25.4 (Autumn 1994): 881–93.

Robertson, Duncan.  “The Dichotomy of Form and Content.”  College English 28.4 (Jan. 1967): 273–79.

Stephens, Alan. “The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters.”  Twentieth Century Literature  9.3 (Oct. 1963): 127–39.

Wellek, René.  “The New Criticism: Pro and Contra.  Critical Inquiry 4.4 (Summer 1978):  611–24.

Winters, Yvor.  In Defense of Reason.  Athens, OH:  Swallow Press, 1987.

———.   Selected Letters of Yvor Winters.  Ed. R. L. Barth.  Athens, OH:  Swallow Press, 2000.

Zabel, Morton Dauwen.  “The Condition of American Criticism: 1939.”  The English Journal 28.6 (Jun. 1939): 417–28.

 

Taking Burke Public: Perspectives on Burke's Connection Between Language and Public Action (Review Essay by Ryan Weber)

By Ryan Weber, Purdue University

 

Smudde, Peter M. “Implications on the Practice and Study of Kenneth Burke’s Idea of a ‘Public Relations Counsel with a Heart.’”  Communication Quarterly Fall 2004: 420–32.

Stob, Paul. “Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the Public.”  Philosophy & Rhetoric 38.3 (2005):  226–47.

Tonn, Mari Boor.  “Taking Conversation, Dialogue, and Therapy Public.”  Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8.3 (2005):  405–30.

 

In his book The New Public, sociologist Leon Mayhew relies heavily on Burke to analyze emergent modes of public discourse. Burke’s ideas are so productive for theorizing publics, Mayhew argues, because for Burke “rhetoric is not merely instrumental, not just a way of tricking an opponent with a flow of words, but a means of entering public life. Rhetoric integrates culture and eloquence by providing enhancing vocabularies for active social participation” (35). Mayhew picks up on what many scholars have realized – Burke’s expansive scholarship develops an entire world. In exploring language, Burke explores the terrain of human society, finding that “Language, of all things, is most public, most collective, in its substance” (PLF 44). It should come as no surprise, then, that many scholars like Mayhew have employed Burke in investigations of public discourse and participation. Three recent articles tackle Burke and the public sphere from different perspectives, providing among them a vast scope for examining Burke’s notions of public discourse.

Paul Stob’s article, “Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the Public,” takes up the issue most generally by arguing that Burke and Dewey “establish a model of the public based on the problems and possibilities of language” (229). Stob’s essay intends to “explore how language can solve problems and build communities” by placing Burke and Dewey in something of a “postmortem dialogue” (228) to compensate for the minimal interaction recorded between these men. Though Burke and Dewey ran in similar leftist social circles, and though Burke reviewed Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty and Liberalism and Social Action, they never directly engaged one another, largely because of political differences over their varying shades of leftist thought. In spite of these political differences, the two thinkers arrived at very similar conclusions about the nature of the public formed by language, so Stob is shrewd in devoting the first portion of his essay to tracing and then transcending these differences. By doing so, he demonstrates concretely how theories of civic engagement may trump particular politics.

These theories are explored by juxtaposing Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems with several Burke works, such as Attitudes Towards History, A Rhetoric of Motives, and Permanence and Change. Burke himself would be proud of Stob’s dramatized parlor conversation, which highlights Burke’s theories as inherently social. Language thoroughly inundates the public sphere, forming for Burke a foundation of the public. Likewise, “social language permeates the individual” (236), allowing public language and public grammar to transform “the individual into a specific type of social being” (236). Stob latches onto the concept of “transformation” to explain the “operative potential” of language, the ability of language to shape and change society. This move effectively develops Burke’s “equipment for living” idea beyond the realm of literature by connecting it to the operations of the public as a whole; Stob deftly manages this delicate concept by applying it to both Burke and Dewey while keeping the practical and aesthetic implications intact. As Stob writes, “for both Burke and Dewey, language is a tool, though neither reduces language to instrumentality alone. Indeed, the aesthetic dimension of language for Burke and Dewey is unmistakable. Language as a tool means language must become operative, practically and aesthetically, in a number of diverse contexts, seeking to accomplish specific tasks and imbue experience with meaning” (239).

The language-as-tool perspective supports a fruitful conclusion advocating societal reconstruction and amelioration. Burke has always been refreshing in his refusal to simply expose and demolish the pieties of language without developing something new in their place, and Stob wisely highlights this view through Burke and Dewey’s insistence that public life can gradually improve through concentration on the operative potential of local discourse. Despite a belief in the transformative power of language, Burke and Dewey do not come across as naïve here; discourse will never be perfect, problems will continually arise, and the public must always continue the arduous work of discourse. But excerpts from Burke’s review of the play Run, Little Chillin! provide a somewhat obscure example of his resolve to pursue gradual improvements for social ills such as a fading sense of spirituality. Though the review is a somewhat perplexing choice of evidence, the point it supports is clear – Burke, like Dewey, believes that a public vested in language can use that language for continued growth and renewal. As Stob writes “Success may only come in small steps, but those steps are enough to begin sharing the words that ameliorate our interconnected world” (245).

Whereas Stob’s excellent article explores public discourse generally, Peter Smudde’s “Implications on the Practice and Study of Kenneth Burke’s Idea of a ‘Public Relations Counsel with Heart’” occupies itself with a subsection of that discourse:  public relations. It is always exciting to see Burke’s theories directed towards rhetorical practitioners, and Smudde aims his analysis directly at a public relations audience. The article draws heavily from Attitudes Towards History, getting significant mileage from Burke’s suggested alternative title for the work, “Manual of Terms for a Public Relations Counsel with Heart.” Following Burke’s own re-reading of his text, Smudde acknowledges that PR spokespersons are viewed through a negative terministic screen that could be altered through Burke’s more humanist conception of public relations. Smudde writes, “within the context of Attitudes Toward History, a publicist is not a positivist who merely reports on social situations, but a humanist whose focus is on inducing cooperation between an organization and its publics” (423).

This bit of perspective by incongruity assigns public relations personnel with several Burkean tasks. First, they produce and interpret the symbolic actions that help order society. As “coaches of attitudes” (423) and writers of “secular prayers” (423), they possess keen insight into the symbol structures of society. Second, they are dramatists who “enact an issue’s drama in specific kinds of public relations texts that present that drama in the best ways for publics and emphasize key messages about it” (427). Public relations issues are viewed as dramas unfolding before various audiences, and the flexibility of the pentad is presented as the key to visualizing the myriad enactments of this drama. Smudde even introduces a clever chart that reveals how press releases and conferences can shift along pentadic lines depending on which ratio the spokesperson emphasizes. Third, as dramatists, public relations personnel also work to foster identification between organizations and audiences. PR spokepersons must therefore become experts in genre and audience analysis in order to best create consubstantiality by catering the appropriate documents to the appropriate audiences. This careful targeting increases opportunities for identification because “members of each audience receive the same message in the appropriate language and form that suits them collectively” (428).

Though Smudde’s article discusses only implicity addresses the “public” in public relations, there is much to glean from the article concerning Burke’s theories of public interaction. Here we see a society organized around the texts of symbolic action. Smudde quotes Burke: “Obedience to reigning symbols of authority is in itself natural and wholesome. The need to reject them is painful and bewildering” (423). While this coincides with the language-oriented public Stob discusses, the public here is defined far more around textuality. Even “social movements can be thought of as texts – the symbolic action of individuals either individually or collectively” (425). Smudde’s own emphasis on the texts of public relations, and their final authority in the discourse between organizations and audiences, reinforces this textual focus. It also creates an image of the public which is a bit too malleable in the face of corporate documents. Smudde writes, “public relations professionals can measure and nurture identification with publics through audience analyses, that the right messages are in the right discourse at the right time” (426). Support for audience analysis and kairos is always encouraging, but Smudde may be neglecting the recalcitrance rhetors face and the competing terministic screens and god-terms they must overcome. The very complexity revealed by multiple configurations of the pentad also underscores the competing agents, vocabularies, and motives that prevent any one discourse from dominating the public sphere.

Smudde’s article, while interesting on the whole, contains a few other minor disappointments. First, he recontextualizes many Burke quotes, replacing original sentence subjects like “writer” or “poet” with “publicist” to facilitate his argument. Given Burke’s own playful renaming of his manuscript and his belief in the irreducible presence of propaganda and word magic within language, he may not be bothered by this bit of metonymy, but it is worth noting. Second, it is unfortunate that the article does not include any real-world illustrations of Burke’s theories operating within the public relations field, especially because Smudde “has found Burke’s ideas to be useful in his career as a public relations professional, consultant, and educator, and these experiences provided the inspiration for the ideas in this article” (421). Readers are given one example of Senator Edward Kennedy manipulating the pentad to unethically shift blame for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, and the appeal to ethics here and throughout the article is laudable. Still, examples of rhetorical and ethical successes through Burke’s method would solidify the author’s point that humanist public relations practitioners can foster identifications between the corporate and public realm.

Where the first two authors are interested in the public founded on language and text, Mari Boor Tonn’s article “Taking Conversation, Dialogue, and Therapy Public” analyzes specifically the discourse the public uses to construct itself. The article takes on the recent tendency towards “conversation” over “debate” and the current obsession over transporting personal therapeutic language into the public sphere. Using Burke as a continuous touchstone, Tonn argues that this seemingly gentler approach to public deliberation, often exalted by politicians, scholars, and psychologists for moving beyond acerbic argument, actually causes additional harm by re-inscribing the oppression and groupthink that it aims to avoid. Furthermore, the very openness of conversation often works to squelch conclusive solutions. She writes, “because conversation has no clearly defined goal, a public conversation may engender inertia as participants become mired in repeated airings of personal experiences without a mechanism to lend such expressions direction and closure” (408). Once the personal becomes political, people ramble on ad naseum about the personal without ever resolving the political.

Initially, this comes off as mean-spirited criticism against those trying to salvage public discourse, and the thesis is a jolt after so many articles have pushed for a more communicative, postmodern discussion model. At first impression, Tonn seems to possess the Modernist instincts that so many have struggled to overcome. Ultimately, though, the article is worth considering for two reasons. First, Tonn provides copious, detailed, and well-researched examples of moments where conversation fails to deliver its promises. For instance, Clinton’s Conversation on Race, which was meant to be an open dialogue between diverse voices concerning America’s prevailing racial issues, was according to Tonn a rather insular and single-minded affair. Only supporters of affirmative action participated, and the dialogue was limited to black–white relations while omitting alternate political or racial perspectives. Tony Blair’s Big Conversation displayed similar groupthink by allowing only carefully chosen and tightly scripted monolingual citizen voices that reinforced government policy. Bill Moyer’s Genesis: The Living Conversation and the University of New Hampshire’s replacement of the Academic Faculty Senate with a conversational University Forum also marginalized voices in the spirit of inclusion. Again, though it is somewhat shocking to see such well intentioned conversations criticized, Tonn’s analysis is intriguing, especially because it accounts for a variety of excluded groups, including academically unpopular demographics like affirmative action detractors and religious fundamentalists.

Tonn’s other saving grace is a foundational trust in the power of language to improve society. This is not just another “talk is cheap” article. The very problem with conversation is that it hijacks more structured, conclusive deliberation because “an open-ended process lacking mechanisms for closure thwarts progress toward resolution” (418). Conversation focused on personal confession and amelioration does not often translate into measurable political change that alters power distribution. And while personal discussion may promote an ethic of care, it rarely generates an ethic of justice. The problem, then, is not symbolic action but ineffective symbolic action. To make this point, Tonn quotes Burke from The Philosophy of Literary Form. “As Burke maintains, while some symbolic forms contain ‘a way in,’ ‘a way through,’ and ‘way out,’ others ‘lead us in and leave us there” (421). It is refreshing to find an article that criticizes dialogue without assuming that discourse is inherently impotent. Tonn writes, “because public argument and deliberative processes are the ‘heart’ of true democracy, supplanting those models with social and therapeutic conversation and dialogue jeopardizes the very pulse and lifeblood of democracy itself” (424). For Tonn, discourse is too important to be left to conversation. Certainly, she attacks non-deliberative symbolic action too forcefully.  But there is an important lesson in her piece:  those who value rhetoric must differentiate between generative and unproductive forms or risk undermining the whole enterprise by defending the worst that discourse has to offer. While many readers may not end up agreeing with Tonn, they should not recoil immediately.

As for Tonn’s use of Burke, it is somewhat surprising. A scholar like Habermas who focuses more on rational civic discourse would be the more conventional choice. And Burke is not the organizing principle of the essay but instead a figure who pops up repeatedly to endorse particular points. Often, this works well, especially when Tonn relies on specific Burkean ideas, like the “Cathartic Principle,” which argues that personal confession places a burden on its witnesses, or the notion of “incantatory imagery,” “wherein rhetors invites persons to see themselves in an idealized form” (Tonn 420), the future self-healed by public therapy. Yet, like Smudde, a few of her quotes reappropraite specific conversations about poetry or music to make them apply to all language generally (this reapplication is mentioned in the footnotes). Branching out beyond Philosophy of Literary Form to use other Burke texts, as Stob does, would have deepened the discussion in the article. Ultimately, Tonn is too quick to claim Burke for the side of efficient dialogue. Burke, whose notion of success was muddling through, who wrote in Counter-Statement that “inefficiency is the one thing [democracy] has in its favor” (114), who championed the unending conversation in the parlor, would not have so quickly dismissed any conversation whose goals were not readily apparent.

Certainly, there is something valid in Tonn’s perspective. Burke rejects dialogue that crushes symbolic action. A few pages after the quote Tonn uses about symbolic forms providing a way “in,” “through,” and “out,” Burke chastises a critic who advocates an inert perspective: “One reviewer, intending to praise the book, hit upon the most damning line of all, in calling it a ‘challenge to the right, center, and left,’ which is pretty much the same as saying that it is a ‘challenge’ to any kind of social action” (PLF 126). The conversations Tonn critiques seem guilty of the same offense. And Tonn definitely should have quoted Burke’s argument in A Rhetoric of Motives that some rhetoric can be divisive in its very inclusiveness, that universal dialogue is ironically exclusionary.

In ways of its own, [rhetoric] can move from the factional to the universal. But its ideal culminations are more often beset by strife as the condition of their organized expression, or material embodiment. Their very universality becomes transformed into a partisan weapon. For one need not scrutinize the concept of "identification" very sharply to see, implied in it at every turn, its ironic counterpart, division. (23)

In Tonn, as in Stob, the public is engaged in a symbolic construction project. But we must return to Stob and Smudde to retrieve the elements Tonn is missing. Stob emphasizes the aesthetic function that language must fulfill. As he writes, “language tries to accomplish practical and aesthetic purposes by infusing objects and events with significance and directing the course of experience” (239). Because of this meaning-making power, Burke considers aesthetics “‘sociological’ in that it can usefully employ coordinates bearing upon social acts in general” (PLF 102). Public engagement relies on metaphors, proverbs, and other stylized answers to civic problems just as it relies on practical or legislative solutions. And Smudde accentuates the role of attitudes in shaping discourse. Whereas Tonn criticizes Clinton for framing the problem of racism as “essentially attitudinal rather than structural” (420), Burke argues that whenever people “name a process or condition, they name it from a meditative, or moralizing, or even hortatory point of view” (ATH iii). Racism cannot be eliminated by merely turning frowns upside down, but it cannot be eliminated absent an attitude adjustment either, because without the corresponding attitude, the public “can’t see the class struggle. It is an interpretation of an event” (ATH 322–23). Changing attitudes often involves symbolic action that seems sluggish and meandering because there is no legislative body over the public’s heart and mind. For Burke, aesthetics and attitude are an inherent part of the public project of discourse, and those forces inspire and shape both sober deliberation and the enormous realm of discussion beyond it.

It is encouraging to find three scholars who believe in public amelioration, and it is further encouraging that they believe in language as the vehicle of this change. These articles also serve as a thought-provoking reminder about the constant public orientation of Burke’s scholarship. Taken together, they sponsor Burke’s public project of using productive symbolic action to enact social change. If rhetoric wishes to expand its civic function, looking to Burke is an excellent place to start.

 

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

---.  Counter-Statement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

---.  The Philosophy of Literary Form. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1941.

---.  A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Mayhew, Leon. The New Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

 

“From the Plaint to the Comic: Kenneth Burke’s Towards a Better Life,” by Krista K. Betts Van Dyck

Betts Van Dyk, Krista K. “From the Plaint to the Comic: Kenneth Burke’s Towards a Better Life.”  Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36.1 (2006): 31–53.

Reviewed by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard, University of Maryland

Quoting a 1946 letter from Kenneth Burke to his lifelong pal Malcolm Cowley, Krista K. Betts Van Dyk begins her essay about Towards a Better Life (TBL) with the following:  “I had always said that, by the time I got through with my critical writings, people would see what I was doing in T.B.L. You now seem to suggest that excerpts from T.B.L. might help them to see what I am doing now” (31). Using Burke’s own rumination on his only novel, Betts Van Dyk focuses the reader on two issues concerning the Burke corpus:  first, the importance of TBL in his vast body of literature; and second, the nature of the relationship between TBL and Burke’s critical work. Betts Van Dyk’s resulting essay helps to clarify both of these issues and results in an illuminating piece of scholarship.

Betts Van Dyk begins to address the significance of Burke’s novel by recalling the reviews of TBL upon its release in 1932. The response was what one would expect of any Burke work:  some loved it and some hated it. Beginning with the reviews, Betts Van Dyk contextualizes Burke’s novel and reminds us of its innovativeness at the time. Furthermore, the reviews also address what is an important point for Betts Van Dyk’s essay; namely, the relationship between Burke’s critical and literary works. Noting that most have read TBL against Burke’s later works, Betts Van Dyk hones the purpose of her essay by asking, “what if Towards a Better Life is read not against other modernist fiction, against Burke’s biography, or even against his later theoretical works, and instead is read in relation to the books he was writing in the 1930s, just after he completed Towards a Better Life?” (33). By reading TBL against Permanence and Change and Attitudes Toward History, Betts Van Dyk seeks the answers to three questions: “What kind of life does John Neal (Burke’s protagonist) initially have?”; “What is this ‘better life’ that he moves toward?”; and “How does he move toward that better life?” (33). Betts Van Dyk argues that John Neal moves toward “the comic frame” (the better life) through “rituals of rebirth.”  

Overall, Betts Van Dyk’s purpose is appreciative. She makes a compelling reason as to why “the novel should be read in relation to Permanence and Change and Attitudes Toward History, and with the same attention as the critical works” (47).  In doing so, she elevates the importance of the novel by demonstrating its strong relationship to Burke’s non-fiction writings. Furthermore, Betts Van Dyk illustrates the similarities among Burke’s works in the late 1920s and early 1930s, providing a level of detail that will satisfy the careful Burkean reader.

Given that Betts Van Dyk focuses on appreciating the relationship between TBL and Burke’s other writings of the period, room remains for exploring the critical relationship between these texts. For example, Betts Van Dyk notes that TBL was an “experimental novel” and quotes Burke’s own observations as to its unique form. Yet, other than the suggestion of the linkage between the “rituals of rebirth” and the novel’s structure, her essay does not explore the critical ramifications of form in TBL. After the noting the unique presentation of the narrative in her introduction to the essay, Betts Van Dyk hones her watchful eye to the details of John Neal’s life without assessing the role of form in that narrative. For future research into TBL and Burke’s 1930s writings, a more reflexive perspective may further develop the complexity of the relationship.

A second question that is prompted by Betts Van Dyk’s essay is, how does TBL influence our reading of the non-fiction works? In general, Betts Van Dyk uses the theoretical vocabulary to explain TBL, as is evident when she writes, “Examining John Neal’s behavior in light of the comic frame and the good life reveals how different his lifestyle is, how far he is from valuing community” (37). Reading from theory to the novel lends a structure and vocabulary to TBL, but what about the impact of the novel on the theoretical and critical texts? Reading the works as constitutive of each other may provide more depth to understanding Burke’s early writings.

But these areas of future research do not diminish Betts Van Dyk’s work on TBL. Her essay is insightful, carefully written, and inspires a new inquiry into the intertextual relationships of Burke’s early writings. Those who teach courses on the works of Kenneth Burke should consider incorporating Betts Van Dyk’s essay, along with TBL, to further demonstrate the scope of Burke’s literary and intellectual program.

 

Democracy and America’s War on Terror, by Robert L. Ivie

Ivie, Robert L.  Democracy and America’s War on Terror.  Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 2005.  

Reviewed by CONTACT _Con-3EF34ED61 \c \s \l Paul Casey, Occidental College

 

The interesting thing about Robert L. Ivie’s Democracy and America’s War on Terror is the way Ivie invokes Kenneth Burke as a complication to Bush administration hubris.   Borrowing Burke’s “comic corrective,” Ivie shows how Bush’s war on evil lacks humility in its construction of easy either/or distinctions.  Burke, Ivie tells readers, knew that “any terminology is suspect to the extent that it does not allow for the progressive criticism of itself.”  Progressive criticism is the exact cure Ivie believes “will be made all the more feasible by engaging a divisive world in the rhetorical idiom of democracy.”  Seeing the Other not as sheer enemy but as “consubstantial rival” might offer a way out of the quite dangerous game of good versus evil currently we are currently playing. 

Ivie locates current American hegemony within a historical framework stretching back to America’s constitutional formation.  The problem, he argues, resides in the formation of a representative government, a republic, based upon a fundamental mistrust of the people.  Ivie links the distaste for real democracy to James Madison, whose aversion to popular rule he expresses in terms associated with disease.  As Ivie notes,

Disease as a charter or model of a distempered people deconstructed the democratic discourse of citizen self-rule and reconstituted the public as an unthinking, irrational mob whose emotions are preyed upon by demagogues, a common herd that lacks sufficient virtue to consider the good of the community. (68)

Ivie’s thesis turns on this disease model, using it to account for reactionary thinking regarding the war on terror.  This model of internal distemper is turned upon the Other, currently figured as the Islamic terrorist.

Ivie cites a dissociation of rhetoric from reason as a major factor in the loss of democracy.  He says Athens was a model of participatory, representative democracy (unless one was unfortunate enough to be a slave or female), where rhetoric was a way of determining good arguments from bad, rather than as a form of trickery.  In Chapter 2, Ivie notes, “all citizens possessed the right to speak on the issues brought before the assembly if they could secure the attention of fellow assemblymen, who readily heckled boring or otherwise objectionable speakers” (52).  The normal, everyday course of political life included mass deliberation, very different from what Ivie terms “the fiction of representation” (69) America faces today.

Democracy is a politically left of center book, as an entire chapter engages in a scathing critique of America’s modern history of aggressive crusading for democracy.  Since World War II placed the United States on the winning side of the war against fascism, Ivie suggests (relying on a wide array of political writers, including Noam Chomsky and Gaddis Smith) that America’s posture has been one of “anti-imperialist imperialism” (107).  The disease metaphor controlling Ivie’s book throughout also runs as a thread through the Presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, Carter, Bush Sr., Clinton, and the current Bush administration.  Of particular note is his profile of Jimmy Carter, a President whose “rhetorical signature was religious imagery, often thoroughly secularized . . . His goal was to persuade the Soviets, whom he knew to be evil, to repent and convert to the ways of freedom—a goal he maintained until it became apparent they were beyond repentance and still continuing their evil ways” (108). 

Not mentioned in Ivie’s book is Carter’s similar stance on Iran.  The author says Carter used power “on behalf of a moral agenda” (109), and nowhere was this more apparent and disastrous than in late 1970’s Iran.  In one of the most significant foreign policy blunders of the modern era, Carter allowed, and even aided in, the collapse of the pro-western Shah.  Some even link the rise of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle East to Carter’s selling out of the secular Shah for his “Christian-warrior” philosophy.

The approach favored by Ivie is a Burkean one in the sense that Burke’s rhetoric of identification, finding places where perceived enemies’ interests overlap, is preferable to the current rhetoric of good and evil.  As Ivie demonstrates in his book, Bush’s “axis of evil” rhetoric is only the most recent manifestation of a distempered demos attitude of representative-style government, where the Other is a construction based upon internal fears of mob rule.   In the end, Ivie’s book offers much in the way of demonstrating the field of rhetoric’s viability and vitality as political critique, stemming as it does from our earliest reckonings of true democracy.

           

 

 

"Becoming Symbol-Wise: Kenneth Burke’s Pedagogy of Critical Reflection," by Jessica Enoch

 

Enoch, Jessica. "Becoming Symbol-Wise: Kenneth Burke’s Pedagogy of Critical Reflection." College Composition and Communication 56.2 (2004): 279-296.

Reviewed by Keith Gibson, Auburn University
KB Journal 1.2 (Spring 2005)

In her article "Becoming Symbol-Wise: Kenneth Burke’s Pedagogy of Critical Reflection," Jessica Enoch describes a side of Kenneth Burke that is too-often neglected: Burke as a teacher. The focus of her article is Burke’s contribution to the 1955 Yearbook of the National Society of Education, "Linguistic Approaches to Problems of Education" (LAPE), in which he set forth a program of education that he believed would, in Enoch’s words, "abate those aggressive and competitive traits in students that eventually lead to global conflict." The article is a must-read for those interested in Burke and/or education: Enoch is thorough in her research, including insights into Burke’s thoughts from an examination of his personal letters, and timely in her analysis, demonstrating how Burke’s views can be brought into the classroom in these similar times.

The first important contribution of this article is the explication of the significant, yet under-read, Burke piece. In LAPE, Burke argues that 1950s education puts too high a premium on competition: "[the] serious student enters school hoping to increase his powers, to equip himself in the competition for ‘success,’ to make the ‘contacts’ that get him a better-paying job." Instead, he explains, school should be a place where students learn to be "exacting in [their] own ambitiousness to cancel off the many prompter ambitions that, given the new weapons, threaten to destroy [them]." Enoch’s summary of the article is excellent, but her discussion is made much richer for her archival work; she quotes several of Burke’s letters of the time that show his thoughts on his own teaching as he develops this philosophy. In a letter to Champion Ward, for instance, Burke noted that he was creating courses to "bridg[e] the gap between ‘literature’ and ‘life’"; to Charlotte Bowman, he wrote that he hoped to demonstrate to students "the momentous role that terminology plays in human thought and conduct"; and to Harold Kaplan, he wrote that he hoped these courses would develop "skill in the chosen subject, appreciation of literary attainments, the imaginative contemplation of human foibles, and the development of equipment for living in general." This glimpse into the intellectual inner-workings of Kenneth Burke is by itself worth the price of admission, and it makes Enoch’s examination of LAPE a unique piece of Burke scholarship.

Enoch does more than simply describe Burke’s work, however; she also brings the article into our time, demonstrating how LAPE can be viewed in conjunction with Freire’s critical literacy work to help us teach our students to be "symbol-wise" today. Pointing out Burke’s observation that rhetoric is "both the use of persuasive resources . . . and the study of them," Enoch draws parallels between this study of language and Freire’s critical reflection. Both Burke and Freire indicate that this analytic stage leads to political action, and it is at this point, Enoch explains, that the rhetoric and composition classroom enters the picture:

This dramatistic classroom would be a place where "the various ‘persuasions’ are brought together" and the "topic [that would] surely transcend them all [would be] the question of persuasion itself" (LAPE 299). The course’s focus would change dramatically (and dramatistically) as it would necessarily highlight and foreground reflection and, as Burke suggests, the "theoretical study of the forms in all persuasion" (300). . . . [T]he composition classroom would become a place where rhetoric is taught as a tool for critical investigation.

Burke’s work is clearly relevant to our current education system and society at large, and LAPE is an excellent piece of scholarship that can directly influence both. Jessica Enoch’s analysis and application of this work are a service to Burke scholarship, education studies, and, with any luck at all, rhetoric and composition students across the country.

"Kenneth Burke’s ‘Attitude’ at the Crossroads of Rhetorical and Cultural Studies," by Sarah Mahan-Hays & Roger C. Aden

 

Sarah Mahan-Hays and Roger C. Aden. "Kenneth Burke’s ‘Attitude’ at the Crossroads of Rhetorical and Cultural Studies: A Proposal and Case Study Illustration." Western Journal of Communication 67 (Winter 2003): 32–55.

Reviewed by Jeff Bennett, Department of Communication, Denison University

Kenneth Burke’s discussion of "trained incapacity" in Permanence and Change emphasizes the limitations created by people’s abilities. He explains that the intellectual equipment enabling thought can subtly conspire against those who do not reflect on their adopted frames of reference, inhibiting ideas that might enrich their lives. It is no small irony then that Burke’s many writings are often utilized in pedagogy and research as a systematic approach to criticism, not as a rhetorical heuristic for inspiring invention. Time and again rhetorical scholars have witnessed the reduction of Burkean criticism to a "method" rather than a critical attitude that is productive only insofar as it exists in articulation with complex cultural texts.

Sarah Mahan-Hays and Roger Aden in "Kenneth Burke’s ‘Attitude’ at the Crossroads of Rhetorical and Cultural Studies: A Proposal and Case Study Illustration" offer readers an antidote to this predicament. They position Burkean criticism not as an instrument for cleaving rhetorical figurines, but instead as an "attitude" for struggling with complex communicative phenomena. Mahan-Hays and Aden employ Burke’s notions of representative anecdote, literature as equipment for living, and frames of acceptance/rejection/transition "to emphasize how Burke’s writings about ‘attitude’ provide a means of synthesizing some of his disparate ideas into a holistic kind of Burkean criticism" (33). The authors acknowledge the complications inherent in defining the word "attitude," but suggest that it is best summed up as "a strategy of interpretation and thus more of a cognitive activity that is then reflected in one’s symbol use" (35).

Situating Burke as a "critical attitude" merits endorsement. It is a useful vehicle for maintaining the late theorist’s relevance in communication studies and for initiating important conversations about Burke in other fields of inquiry. Mahan-Hays and Aden are especially invested in furthering the relationship that exists between communication scholars and the eclectic discipline of cultural studies, which continues to gain capital in our departments, journals, and classrooms. The authors advance their argument by exploring what Burkean criticism might look like in cultural studies, putting their heuristic into dialogue with fan reactions to the cable television program Talk Soup. In doing so, they illustrate how a Burkean approach stressing critical attitudes can help explain issues of popular culture, consumption, and the "everyday."

Undoubtedly, there will be skeptics who do not see the connection between some of Burke’s more modernist leanings and the fragmented multiplicity of cultural studies. However, from a Burkean perspective, this seeming contradiction is the very power inherent in such conversations. Blending the languages of rhetoric and cultural studies has unlimited potential when one considers the endless possibilities in activism, pedagogy, and research (and not necessarily as discrete units). After all, both rhetorical and cultural studies are concerned with notions of community—not just the possibilities provided by norms but also the possibilities marginalized by them. Each is devoted to critiques of cultural logics, the particulars of context, and the idea that reality is mediated by performative iterations of language. At the same time, there are many differences to be discerned among these disciplines, and Mahan-Hays and Aden offer an opportunity to think through these continually evolving interchanges. For instance, one might ponder how Burke’s critical project informs seemingly unrelated genres of scholarship such as ethnography or theories of the body. Conversely, one might consider how critical race theory or feminist theory offers a corrective to Burke, not just in terms of power and identity, but recalcitrance and casuistic stretching.

Proposing such intersections is not without precedent. There are traces of Burke’s influence scattered throughout strands of cultural theory. One such example is in anthropologist Ester Newton’s groundbreaking work on "camp" aesthetics. Although queer theorists might be expected to turn to Michel Foucault or Judith Butler before casting a glance at Burke, Newton exhibits how his scholarship can be useful for those who are investigating the attitudinal relationship between marginalized audiences and popular texts. She explains that camp is a "strategy for a situation," not a phenomena that can be methodologically explained. Borrowing in part from Burke’s litany of terms, she asserts that the content of camp is incongruity, the style is theatrical, and the strategy is comic. In Newton’s writings one finds a critical attitude expressed through a critique which might be called Burkean, not an over-reliance on Burkean concepts for the sake of theory building.

Michel de Certeau reminds us that just because a population does not control the production of cultural texts does not mean they cannot control the ways in which it is consumed. Using Burke as a conceptual guide, criticism might be approached in a similar manner. One can broach the strictures and prospects of language with a keen eye towards creating new frames of being. By joining Burke’s conceptual attitude with the vocabularies of cultural studies, Mahan-Hays and Aden offer one path for entering the grand debates of the humanities, advancing a message that is steeped in both theory and praxis without oversimplifying the complex tasks confronted by rhetorical and cultural scholars.

"The Domain of Public Consciousness," by Mary E. Stuckey

 

Mary E. Stuckey. “‘The Domain of Public Consciousness’": Woodrow Wilson and the Establishment of a Transcendent Political Order. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6.1 (2003): 1–24.

Reviewed by Michael L. Butterworth, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, Bloomington

In 2004, the United States has a president who speaks of a providential mission to bring democracy to the world, who resists complexity and does not “do nuance," and who insists that the only way to be an American in a post-9/11 world is to submit to a unity constituted and perpetuated by the government. Although George W. Bush would likely claim Ronald Reagan or even Richard Nixon as his rhetorical inspirations, Mary E. Stuckey's article, “‘The Domain of Public Consciousness,’" suggests that Bush’s construction of American democracy and citizenship might owe more to the legacy of Woodrow Wilson.

Nearly a century ago, Wilson faced a rhetorical challenge because, as Stuckey notes, “the polity he attempted to unite was both diverse and fractious" (1). Among the issues before the president were growing labor unrest, a strengthening women’s suffrage movement, and heightened violence in the Jim Crow South. Rather than address each segment of a pluralistic society, Wilson absorbed these particularities into the universal American citizen and, as Stuckey argues, “set the stage for the ‘American Century’" (2). Her essay, informed by Kenneth Burke’s notions of transcendence and consubstantiality, proceeds by demonstrating three strategies the president used to achieve a singular unity among the polity. By first relying on the Democratic Party as a “non-partisan" instrument of political action and then delimiting the reach of the executive branch into matters of “state's rights," Wilson mobilized a third strategy, whereby a rhetoric of consubstantiality “supported Wilson’s claim to be sole arbiter of American values and sole spokesperson for the nation" (3).

Stuckey’s analysis is persuasive, and she supports her thesis with multiple accounts from Wilson’s public speeches. What is arguably most striking is the extent to which Wilson deployed inclusive language while pursuing policies that were at best indifferent and at worst in opposition to women, African-Americans, and immigrants. “Over and over," she writes, “Wilson claimed that there were no interests that divided Americans; he listed all Americans as equal in his prose, and insisted that all Americans were spiritually identified and identical" (9). Moreover, he extended his defense of American principles into foreign policy, through which he sought to bring democracy and “civilization" to the world. As Stuckey reveals, “These examples amounted to a narrative of identification that, again in Burke’s words, served to ‘cloak the state of division’ as it asserted national unity" (14).

Stuckey concludes that Wilson’s public communication not only had consequences for the American public at the time, but also “helped him establish the definitional primacy of the office in the twentieth century" (17). This, no doubt, is the case. However, Stuckey stops short of extending her analysis into concrete contemporary terms and therefore bypasses an opportunity to further her Burkean contribution. Perhaps constrained by the limits of space any author wrestles with in a journal article, Stuckey nevertheless fails to draw important parallels between a Wilsonian rhetoric and one utilized by President Bush. When Wilson stated, for example, that “America has a cause which is not confined to the American continent. It is the cause of humanity itself" (16), he forecasted Bush’s own claim that “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, but is God’s gift to humanity" (“State"). In the context of the so-called “war on terrorism," we would be wise to heed the lessons of history.

Burke himself, of course, famously warned in “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’" that Hitler’s “medicine" should be understood critically so that we might “forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America" (191). Bush’s rhetoric, and the disturbing restrictions on civil liberties enabled by it, indeed are worthy of such caution and critique. For as the Bush administration continues to insist that dissent is unpatriotic and only helps bolster the cause of America’s enemies, it should be clear that the exclusions masked by Wilson in a language of inclusion are equally applicable and relevant to the political climate today.

Stuckey’s use of Burke’s critical vocabulary yields an analysis that clearly demonstrates the potency of the “rhetorical presidency." Although she does not pursue a comparative approach, her eloquent assessment of Wilson’s rhetorical strategies invites other critics to explore the ways in which a Burkean attitude may contribute a productive comic voice. Significantly, she suggests that even as presidents speak one language they may be enabling another. More than ever, we are reminded that a critical attitude toward presidential rhetoric and leadership is necessary if we are to engage, respect, and welcome the diversity of the world in which we all live.

Works Cited

Bush, George W. “State of the Union." 28 Jan. 2003. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html (27 September 2004).

Burke, Kenneth. “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle.’" The Philosophy of Literary Form. 3^rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.

"The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy," by Brian L. Ott & Eric Aoki

 

Ott, Brian L. and Aoki, Eric. "The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy: Media Framing of the Matthew Shepard Murder." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5.3 (2002): 483–505.

Reviewed by Jamie Skerski, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, Bloomington

Ott and Aoki offer a poignant critique of the media coverage surrounding the horrific beating and subsequent death of Matthew Shepard, demonstrating both the constitutive and transformative potential of symbolic forms. Their compelling essay productively advances Kenneth Burke’s theories of symbolic action, terministic frames, and the comic corrective. The authors argue that the mass media’s tragic framing of Shepard’s death was the driving force behind the public vilification process that transformed Shepard’s murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, into convenient scapegoats, thus alleviating a sense of collective guilt and responsibility for our individual participation in a homophobic society. The vilification process becomes clear through the authors’ careful attention to the changing news coverage between Shepard’s death and McKinney’s trial. As Ott and Aoki write, "in the first few days after the attack, the public was forced, if only temporarily, to confess the prevalence of homophobic attitudes across the country" (491). That is, Shepard’s death directly confronted Americans with its homophobia—what had become the last socially acceptable prejudice.

Initially, the public anguish over the murder led to renewed debates over the importance of instating hate crime legislation. However, as time passed, "Slowly, almost unnoticeably, discourse in the news media was shifting from the country’s homophobia to that of the perpetrators, where it was being recoded as a character flaw rather than a wide-scale institutional prejudice" (492). As the trial approached, McKinney and Henderson were symbolically transformed. At first, they were two men with whom we might identify and recognize, but now they were dehumanized as isolated villains: they became "two very sick and twisted people" rather than men who could have lived next door (492). This mediated transformation and dehumanization created a symbolic distance between the public and the killers; we could no longer find identification with these villains and were relieved of any social culpability. While the actual trial may have served as a sense of social closure in the public mourning of Matthew Shepard, Ott and Aoki argue that the media coverage of the killers fostered an overly simplistic symbolic resolution to the story, reinforcing a heterosexist order and eliminating "the self-reflective space that might serve as the basis for social and political change" (494).

Beyond simply demonstrating the tragic frame of the murder and the problematic social implications, the authors also provide that very self-reflective space the media lacks in their indictment. Perhaps the most notable aspect of this essay is its productive capacity in re-constituting the public as critically reflective participants in the social order. Advocating Burke’s notion of the comic frame, the authors call for momentum in the direction of maximum consciousness—"self-awareness and social responsibility at the same time" (497). Rather than merely rejecting the media coverage with an attitude of pure debunking, they present productive and socially responsible critique, prompting a unique sense of critical reflection in the reader. The authors demonstrate their own constitutive and transformative potential – you cannot walk away from this article unmoved.

Ott and Aoki’s politically charged analysis thoughtfully engages theoretical concepts in ways that welcome the newcomer to Burke while remaining provocative to those thoroughly-versed in Burkean perspectives. This essay exemplifies Burke’s relevance to contemporary social relations, yet it leaves room for further elaboration. For example, the authors do gesture to the ideological implications embedded in dramatic forms, yet miss an opportunity to explore the value of Burke for theories of hegemony. The dehumanization process which transformed the killers from knowable subjects to incomprehensible monsters represents a complex hegemonic absorption technique of violation and repair that calls for further exploration.

Burke's New Boiks: Get 'em While They're Hot and Before They're Not . . .

In the mid-1930s, Kenneth Burke—fed up with the lumbering pace and bureaucracy of publishing—decided to start his own publishing network. He enlisted several of his buddies to help and, critically, to write books for this new enterprise. He was going to call it "Manuscript Press," or something like that. It flopped. Later in life, he resurrected the idea and, thanks to the new technology of photocopying, sent his unpublished manuscripts all over the place. If you're lucky, you might even have one. I had a copy of Poetics, Dramatistically Considered sent to me (quite graciously) by the widow of James Sibley Watson, Burke's long-time benefactor.

We are in the midst of a miraculous renaissance in Burke studies, judging by the success of recent conferences (such as KB and His Circles at Penn State in 2005), by the emergence of KB Journal, and by the number of excellent books and articles by and about Burke that have been published in the last few years. I use the term miraculous intentionally. I worry that it won't last if we don't support the publishers, editors, and authors who help us make this scholarship public. [Disclosure: I am closely involved with KB Journal, Parlor Press, and some of the books themselves as an author.] KB Journal editors discussed the urgency and opportunity of this moment and decided that we should do whatever we can to draw attention to new books and other scholarship relevant to Burke studies. Our "Reviews" section launched that effort in previous issues. We continue it here with this, a gallery of Burke-authored books that we think KB Journal readers should buy and read. Soon, we will create another book gallery that directs readers to recent books about Burke (there are some fine ones). That scholarship is important as well, and we owe it to each other to read each other's work. In the last five years, we have been lucky to see terrific new books published by the University of South Carolina Press, Parlor Press, the University of California Press, Black Sparrow Books, and others. Books from these publishers help define the future of our scholarship and, importantly, give others hope that a book on rhetoric generally or Burke in particular still has some chance of being published, in spite of the bleak forecast that our presses are dying out. We shouldn't—we can't—let that happen.

In "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies: A Piacular Rite," James Aune recently suggested that the difficulties faced by our publishers are symptomatic of a wider problem: Perhaps we are not speaking or writing to each other as much as we used to, or maybe we are understandably distracted by too much information competing for too little attention. Perhaps we are too bent on tracking down our own implications (to put a Burkish twist on it). Aune writes,

We need to agree on a core of courses and research projects. The social sciences progress by making doctoral dissertations reflect the research project of the advisor; we consistently allow dissertations to reflect the unique interests of the writer. The result is work across the map that does not gather a sustained audience. And this matters. In the last few years we have lost several high quality book series because rhetoricians do not buy each other’s books. And no wonder: if each rhetorician is a specialty onto him or herself, why buy a book outside the specialty? (73; Quarterly Journal of Speech 92.1 [February 2006]: 69-76)

Rhetorician's don't buy each other's books! Aune may be right about that, but I hope the generalization doesn't hold for too long. So, let me just say, "Buy Burke Books!" Here are some of Burke's own. We will add to this book gallery as we go. If you have any suggestions for {Burke] books to list here, let us know. We have provided links, where possible, directly to the publisher's site, where you can sometimes get a better deal and also rest assured that your money goes to the publisher and author of the book rather than to someone who didn't publish it or write it. The list is ordered by date of publication (or pending publication), starting with the most recent. In the Fall 2006 issue of KB Journal, we include Julie Whitaker's introduction and three poems from Burke's Late Poems, 1968-1993.

—David Blakesley

New Books by Kenneth Burke
	Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare Kenneth Burke Edited by Scott L. Newstok © 2007 by Parlor Press This volume gathers and annotates all of the Shakespeare criticism, including previously unpublished notes and lectures, by the maverick American intellectual Kenneth Burke (1897–1993). Burke’s interpretations of Shakespeare have had an impressive influence on important lines of contemporary scholarship; playwrights and directors have been stirred by his dramaturgical investigations; and many readers outside academia have enjoyed his ingenious dissections of what makes a play function. Artist and illustrator Taylor Jones drew the cover image of Kenneth Burke. Order the book from Parlor Press.
	Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955 Kenneth Burke Selected, Arranged, and Edited by William H. Rueckert © 2007 by Parlor Press (street date 18 November 2006) 340 pages, with introduction, bibliography, notes, and index In this long-awaited third volume in his Motivorum trilogy, renowned critic and philosopher Kenneth Burke offers his most precise and elaborated account of his dramatistic poetics. Order the book from Parlor Press
	Late Poems, 1968–1993 Attitudinizings Verse-wise, While Fending for One's Selph, and in a Style Somewhat Artificially Colloquial Kenneth Burke Edited by Julie Whitaker and David Blakesley © 2006 by the University of South Carolina Press The first publication of over 150 poems from Burke's final decades Order the book from the University of South Carolina Press
	Here & Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke Kenneth Burke Introduction by Denis Donoghue © 2005 by David R. Godine, Publishers (Black Sparrow Press) Here & Elsewhere collects, for the first time in one volume, all of Burke’s fiction. Order the book from Black Sparrow Press
	On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows, 1967-1984 Kenneth Burke Edited by William H. Rueckert and Angelo Bonadonna. Arranged and Annotated by William H. Rueckert 403 pages © 2003 by the University of California Press Brings together the late essays, autobiographical reflections, an interview, and a poem by the eminent literary theorist and cultural critic Kenneth Burke (1897-1993). Order the book from the University of California Press
	The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke Edited by James H. East © 2003 by the University of South Carolina Press 328 pages An illuminating conversation between poet and critic Order the book from the University of South Carolina Press
	Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959-1987 Edited by William H. Rueckert; transcribed from the originals by Barbara L. Rueckert; foreword by Angelo Bonadonna © 2003 by Parlor Press 344 pages These letters show the development of Burke’s thought in the last thirty or so years of his life, when he remained remarkably productive not only as a correspondent but as a critic and traveling scholar. Rueckert became for Burke both student and “co-conspirator,” with Burke himself playing the roles of teacher, mentor, father, and peer. Order the book from Parlor Press

Embarking on Burke: Profiles of New Scholars

The future of Burke scholarship is in the hands of young scholars who build on an early interest in Burke and develop research agendas that use Burke’s teachings for critique and that contribute to our unending conversation about Burke and his ideas. To encourage and promote these scholars, we have requested profiles of scholarship from recent graduates of doctoral institutions who focused their dissertations on Burke, and we present more than a dozen of them below in alphabetical order. They come from a variety of fields: art, communication, composition, environmental planning, and literature. We hope that the Burke community will get to know these scholars and their work, seeking them out when putting together edited books, seeking them out when putting together panels for conferences, and seeking them out as co-authors. We have included their contact information to facilitate such scholarly relationships. We encourage them to submit their future work to KB Journal, so that our audience of Burke scholars from various disciplines can become interlocutors learning from and contributing to this scholarly conversation.

Brooks, Ronald Clark. Red Scare Rhetoric and Composition: Early Cold War Effects on University Writing Instruction, 1934-1954. Dissertation: University of Oklahoma, 2004. (Directed by Catherine Hobbs, Department of English.)

This work argues that by focusing on the early Cold War period in writing instruction we can more fully understand how remnants of the Cold War shape our own epistemological assumptions. In the field of composition and rhetoric, it is generally assumed that teachers in the fifties operated under the “current-traditional paradigm,” that they were pressured to focus on rhetorical and grammatical principles without considering their cultural context. A closer investigation of this assumption proves that while this argument has some merit current traditional rhetoric played a different role in the academy during the fifties than it does today.

A thorough description and analysis of one of the first academic freedom cases in the early Cold War (i.e., the University of Washington case) helps outline these differences, which are further clarified by looking more closely at textbooks by James McCrimmon, and Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; the teaching practices of Theodore Baird and Charlton Laird; the rhetorical philosophy of Richard Weaver; and the published responses to anticommunism by the NCTE. Through the clarification of these differences we are then able to understand, in a more contextualized manner, the unique contributions found in the teaching philosophies of Herbert Weisinger, Albert Kitzhaber, and other scholars at the first meetings of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Finally, this contextualization helps us more thoroughly understand the unique contribution of Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory. Most rhetoricians in the fifties were forced to either champion the national agenda or work around it in circuitous ways. Brooks and Warren presented a rhetoric that worked with our nationalist agenda. Weaver responded by redefining the terms of conservative versus liberal rhetoric. Burke, more than any other, was able to “transcend” the binaries that the Cold War tried to force on the field. He gave a rhetorically savvy speech to the American Writers Congress in 1935, maintained a Popular Front orientation, and engaged in a more sophisticated form of Propaganda Analysis than did the IPA, but most importantly, his work proved to be very influential for the scholars who helped set the groundwork for the field of rhetoric and composition. In this regard, Burke helps us synthesize the history, pedagogy, and rhetoric of the Cold War period and gives us a way of contextualizing the teaching of writing by paying particular attention to points of disagreement within language and institutional systems.

Ronald Clark Brooks, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Composition
Oklahoma State University
ron.brooks@okstate.edu

Clapp, Tara Lynne. “Environmental Identities: Rhetorics of Environmental Planning.” Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2003. (Directed by Niraj Verma with Greg Hise and David Sloane, School of Planning, Policy and Development, and Randall W. Lake, Annenberg School for Communication.)

In environmental planning, the communicative turn has most frequently been represented as requiring more inclusive, honest, and representative communication. Burke’s point that language users may be used by language is relatively new to planning. Particular communicative situations may echo or be structured in relation to larger discursive forms. In my dissertation, I argue for the relevance of communicative forms to planning communication by illustrating the connection between particular, situated environmental planning conflicts and durable communicative forms in environmental literature.

In “Environmental Identities” I characterize three social identities that animate environmental planning and citizenship in the discourses of toxicity, stewardship, and environmental analysis. Individuals are constrained in communication and identity by the communicative forms that are available. Forms are durable, but innovation may occur. I consider the influence of three texts on environmental discourse and the constitution of environmental citizenship: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature.

Burke proposed that forms have consequences for action. Forms help to create expectations and attitudes towards the natural world, identities for our selves and motivations for our actions. Using Burke’s dramatism and textual analyses, I show the sources and consequences of the forms of these three texts for the identities and actions of those involved in environmental planning. The social identities expressed through these texts help to constitute important identities of environmental citizenship, including popular movements and professional associations. The way the three texts are applied in discourse shows how the forms embodied in the texts are translated to action.

Narrowly, my dissertation argues that environmental literature influences the particular communicative and local situations of environmental planning. More broadly, my research shows the importance of form in generalizing between communicative situations.

My ‘social identity’ approach integrates the internal form of the Grammar with the identification and alienation of the Rhetoric to propose durable communicative forms as equipment for political living. The contribution of the Rhetoric is of an ‘identity’ as a social distinction that may attract more or fewer adherents. The contribution of the Grammar is as a method of characterizing ‘social identities’ as forms that translate between literature and life. The ‘social identity’ that I propose is a characteristic form that functions as an identity for adherents, that can be dramatistically described, and can be traced in use in both literature and life.

I continue to apply Burkean theories in the realms of environmental planning, thought and education. Currently, my focus is on climate change. Climate change discourse on the whole has been found to be relatively disabling for action, particularly at the local level. Accordingly, I am investigating the discursive forms that allow or enable local governments and citizens to take action to reduce greenhouse gases and increase sustainability. In my current research, I am describing the local social identities that have helped to motivate or enable action.

Tara Lynne Clapp, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Community and Regional Planning
Iowa State University
(515) 294-7759
tlclapp@iastate.edu

Dangler, Doug. “Write Now: A Dramatistic View of Internet Messenger Tutorials.” Dissertation. Ohio State University. 2004. (Directed by Beverly J. Moss and Scott Lloyd DeWitt of the OSU Department of English.)

The advent of computer technology in writing centers has forced administrators, tutors, and clients to reconsider what they do and how they do it. The construction of a new metaphor for online interactions suggests better ways to interact online. To this end, my dissertation develops the idea of the Fluid Cyborg, a combination of the theories of Kenneth Burke and Donna Haraway, as a means to explain and anticipate online tutoring behavior. Burke’s theories providing the critical lens and Haraway’s offer means of reconsidering Burke’s concepts for a virtual age. My intent is to offer suggestions for reconsidering applications of Burke into an area he often rejected: technology.

Doug Dangler, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing
Ohio State University
(614) 292-1308
dangler.6@osu.edu

Groce, Gary S. “A Pentadic Examination of Kenneth Burke’s Perspective by Incongruity: Reading Burke’s Nietzschean Intertext.” Diss. Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 2005. (Major Professor: Professor Clarisse Zimra, Dept. of English.)

This dissertation is a full-length study of Kenneth Burke’s “Perspective by Incongruity” (PbyI), a concept introduced in his book Permanence and Change (1935). Burke attributes its genesis to his analysis of Nietzsche’s styles; therefore, the content of this study necessarily involves an examination of Burke’s Nietzschean intertext. As Debra Hawhee once asserted, Nietzsche is the single most significant influence on Kenneth Burke (especially the younger Burke). Why then, she asked in 1999, is Nietzsche slighted in the discourse universe some call Burke studies?

The terms of Burke’s Pentad thematize four chapters, with the second chapter combining purpose and scene into a ratio.

Chapter two is the foundational chapter, and maps the context that formed Burke’s interest in and exposition of PbyI. This chapter urges a reorientation of Burke as primarily a Nietzschean confronting Marx, while distinguishing his approach from Freud. To illustrate how reading Burke as a psychoanalytic (or Freudian) critic can be misleading, Fredric Jameson’s 1977 critique of Burke is examined.

Chapter three scopes into a close reading of Burke’s introduction of sparagmos. The theme is agency; sparagmos is the instrumental aspect of PbyI. This chapter attends to Burke’s juxtaposition of images, often clustered incongruously, in his text on Nietzsche and sparagmos. Sparagmos is aesthetic, rather than anaesthetic, because it refers to felt language.

Chapter four belongs grammatically to the term act. Burke freely enacts instances of PbyI in his only novel, Towards a Better Life. This chapter examines Burke’s rhetorical modes (his Six Pivotals), according to which he constructed this text. The key mode is invective; but, invective, being impious, is related to PbyI. Published in 1931, Burke felt this novel would determine his success or failure in the arts. When the book fizzled, he turned to literary criticism and philosophy.

The novel’s theme and some of its formal attributes share a great deal with those of French modernists like Valéry and Huysmans. The primary motive of this chapter is to relate the key rhetorical mode to the theme of the work.

Chapter Five takes up the only remaining term: agent. This chapter surveys Burke’s position on subjectivity through various sources, but focuses on two of his better-known critical efforts on Keats and Coleridge. Burke’s agent term and its subcategory, the subject, are examined through his approach to the author/subject. His perspective on human subjectivity is decidedly Nietzschean, due to his focus on physiology’s decisive involvement in symbolic production.

Conventionally, KB is assumed to be a Freudo-Marxist literary critic. Reading Nietzsche back into Burke’s texts reinvigorates them by forcing a re-evaluation of his theory of language, and his relationship to psychoanalysis and Marxism. Nietzsche’s influence explains many of his seemingly idiosyncratic comments in essays, especially those of literary criticism. Burke remained fixed on the role of the human physiology and its relation to symbol-using.

Gary Scott Groce, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Black Hills State University
(605) 642-6040
garygroce@bhsu.edu

Hatch, John B. “Reconciliation as a Tragicomic Corrective: From Racial Offense to Rhetorical Coherence.” Diss. Regent University, 2003 (Directed by Michael P. Graves, School of Communication.)

This dissertation is the basis of a forthcoming book entitled Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice (Lexington, 2008). Both begin with the persistent racial divide and Mark McPhail’s diagnosis of racism as grounded in a language of negative difference. I argue that his proposed remedy—rhetoric reformulated in terms of dialogic coherence—amounts to a comic reframing and shares the limitations of Burke’s comic correctives. Racial reconciliation offers a more robust alternative, rhetorically bridging the tragic legacy of racism and comic visions of multicultural harmony through remembrance, apology, forgiveness, and reparation. I rework Burkean frames and logology to develop a theory of reconciliation and apply it to recent racial reconciliation discourse. The dissertation examines a 1999 reconciliation conference in West Africa; the book also explores recent legislative apologies for the enslavement of African Americans.

A survey of multidisciplinary literature suggests that satisfactory reconciliation is tragicomic, combining a clear sense of justice, guilt, and sacrifice with awareness that victimizers and victims inter-depend for redemption, healing, and a “good life.” Reconciliation also discloses a tensional interdependence between agency and truth (which work rhetorically as romantic and realistic frames on reconciliation). Former perpetrators tend to approach reconciliation romantically and comically, victims realistically and tragically. Thus, reconciliation entails reframing through repentance and forgiveness, weaving disparate narratives into a rounded (if incomplete) narrative of injury and restoration. It often draws upon religious narratives and rites to facilitate this hermeneutic work, since they prefigure resolutions to deep moral contradictions.

I incorporate logology, tempered by Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy, to understand reconciliation’s sacred/secular coming-to-terms. Arguing that Burke erred in making Order (rather than Covenant) the basis for the cycle of terms he derived from the Christian metanarrative, I distill a tetrad of constitutive value terms—Justice, Peace, Truth, and Agency—from reconciliation discourse. The tetrad is dia-logological: the terms act upon one another and give rise to hybrid terms (e.g., Restorative Justice). Satisfactory reconciliation embodies/facilitates their emergent conversation, though differently for perpetrators and victims. Perpetrators’ reconciliation discourse should display tragic judgment on very real wrongs done to victims, with commitment to repair the damage; in turn, this may facilitate victims’ work of romantic and comic reframing (forgiveness). While recent state slavery apologies disavow being a basis for reparation lawsuits, they do demonstrate a significant shift toward thorough, regretful acknowledgment in a tragic frame. As such, they contribute to the possibility of legislative reparations and racial reconciliation.

See also John B. Hatch, “Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the Rhetoric of Race Relations,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (2003): 737-64 (with forum responses by Erik Doxtader, Kirt H. Wilson, and Mark Lawrence McPhail in issue 7:3), John B. Hatch, “The Hope of Reconciliation: Continuing the Conversation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9 (2006): 259-77, and John B. Hatch, “Beyond Apologia: Racial Reconciliation and Apologies for Slavery,” Western Journal of Communication 70 (2006): 186-211.

John B. Hatch, Ph.D.
Wendt Professor / Associate Professor of Communication
University of Dubuque
jhatch@dbq.edu

Nash, Rachel. “The Discourse of Canadian Multiculturalism.” Diss. University of Waterloo, 2003. (Directed by Glenn Stillar of English Language and Literature.)

“The Discourse of Canadian Multiculturalism” examines multiculturalism discourse in Canada through consideration of three influential manifestations of that discourse: the popular press’s treatment of multiculturalism, the federal government’s publications on multiculturalism, and the literary community’s response to the phenomenon in terms of self-identified anthologies of multicultural literature. The dissertation uses three different theories for analysis—dramatism, discourse analysis, and social semiotics—citing their shared emphasis on the social role of language and their perspective on language as a system of options from which language users make choices and produce effects, often unintentionally.

Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, especially the concepts of pentad and substance are used to analyze the Canadian press’s discourse of multiculturalism. Analysis reveals that the press—despite its apparently negative attitude toward topic—actually supports the principles underlying multiculturalism through the ways in which it habitually represents the issue. Specifically, the dissertation argues that, like the discourse of Canada as a whole, the press’s discourse of multiculturalism foregrounds scene, a conservative and stabilizing force for multiculturalism which, as a concept, tends toward fragmentation. In addition, nutritive substance, a minor Burkean term, proves useful in describing and analyzing the way in which this discourse establishes a safe ground, between the detached, acultural possibility of geometric substance and the volatile tribal dangers inherent in the evocation of familial substance. In nutritive substance the external becomes internalized, as the formerly geometric identity of “Canada” becomes part of the hybridized multicultural Canadian’s new identity.

This dissertation applies discourse analysis to government publications on multiculturalism and social semiotics to multicultural literary anthologies, positing connections between these associated theories and discourses.

The Discourse of Canadian Multiculturalism contributes to the field of Burke studies primarily through the dialogue it opens up between Burkean ideas and the more closely allied fields of social semiotics and discourse analysis. Through the extended application of these theoretical approaches from different intellectual traditions, the dissertation suggests new connections—parlor talk in Burkean terms. Also, the relatively undeveloped concept of nutritive substance receives a novel application which may be useful to other researchers.

Using a broad range of methods of inquiry, including dramatism, I (along with my research partner, Dr. Will Garrett-Petts) am currently engaged in a long term investigation into artistic research, especially the artists’ statement.

Rachel Nash, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, English and Modern Languages
Thompson Rivers University
(250) 377 4965
rnash@tru.ca

Park, Melissa M. “Narrative Practices Of Intersubjectivity: An Ethnography of Children with Autism in a Sensory Integration Based Occupational Therapy Clinic.” Diss. University of Southern California, 2005. (Directed by Mary C. Lawlor of the Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.)

This ethnography utilized a conceptual framework of narrative to examine how children with autism and occupational therapists connect to and organize their actions with each other in a sensory integration-based clinic. Data collected over an eleven-month period included narrative interviews with primary caregivers, participant observations, field notes, and videotaping of the dyadic interaction between five preschool-aged children with autism and related disorders, and three occupational therapists. Data analysis and interpretation, including microanalysis of gestures and expressions, underlined how enacted narratives emerge out of actions that create significant and aesthetic moments.

Findings highlighted the agency and narrative practices of intersubjectivity that children embodied to organize their actions and connect to therapists. Drawing from Burke’s Grammar, the study argues that scenic practices include the symbolic acts that (re)create particular sociocultural scenes. The proclivity of such practices challenge DSM-IV diagnostic criteria that children with autism have deficits in narrative competence, imaginary play, or intersubjectivity. Such results underline the utility of narrative as (1) a conceptual framework that embraces embodiment and issues of power in sociocultural structures, and as (2) an intervention for occupational therapy practice focused on sociality and the organization of action across spatiotemporal horizons.

The philosophy of occupational therapy foregrounds individual agency, action and purpose: As Reilly argues: “…[M]an through the use of his hands can creatively deploy his thinking, feeling and purposes to make himself at home in the world and to make the world his home.” Thus, a key tenet of Burke’s Dramatism—humans act while objects are in “mere motion”—is highly relevant to this healthcare practice that utilizes activities as a medium of change. A focus on how to motivate individuals to action when they face the contingencies of illness experiences or a disability status is both pragmatically necessary and rhetorically useful for distinguishing the work of this rehabilitation profession from the “biomedical model,” which treats bodies through drugs and surgery. Beyond such rhetorical similarities, Burke’s Dramatism was also relevant to data interpretation and analysis—both verbal and participant observations. For example, the “dramatistic screen” provided a way to understand the limits of the various terministic screens that guided the actions of the occupational therapists. Further, the structure of clinical interaction is not only shaped by circulating metaphors, such as a journey, but also dramatic as providers and clients seek to create significant experiences.

Forthcoming articles and book chapters for anthropology, occupational science, and occupational therapy audiences will apply the following inter-related Burkian concepts: (1) symbol use, (2) the scene-act ratio, (3) the entanglement of aesthetics and ethics, and (4) attitudes as incipient acts, in order to deepen understanding of how narrative practices shape transformation and healing. Further, Burke’s analogies between dramatic structures and embodied experiences (i.e. appetite, walking, breathing) have threaded through the development of a conceptual model on “embodied metaphors,” that in the spirit of dramatism, aims for a yes-and comedic approach to the stances and terms that guide treatment evaluation and efficacy.

Melissa Park, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of California at Los Angeles-Semel Institute
mmpark@ucla.edu

Lane Relyea, "Model Citizens and Perfect Strangers: American Painting and Its Different Modes of Address, 1958-1965." Diss. University of Texas at Austin, 2004. (Supervisor: Richard Shiff, Department of Art and Art History.)

My argument in this dissertation is that artworks made in New York between 1958 and 1965, the heyday of color-field painting, minimalism and pop art, comprise different responses to the perceived crisis embroiling advanced art at the time—namely, the threat of misinterpretation posed by a rapidly expanding consumer audience. It is possible to see the general concern over art's relation to its audience in terms of a crisis of metaphor; pivotal innovations during this period, especially in painting, mark a move beyond metaphor in search of alternative modes of address. These different modes can be characterized using the categories provided by rhetorical analysis, in particular the schema of the four master tropes as expounded by Kenneth Burke. For example, color-field painting can be thought of as synecdochic, minimalism as metonymic, and pop as ironic. All three offer strategies to ward off misappropriation: the first by disallowing any interpretive leeway, by shoring up all space between viewer and painting so that the encounter seems to happen within "eyesight alone," in the intimate proximity and instant of looking; the second involves giving the artworks over to viewing while also steeling them against it, so that only obdurate surface and irrefutable fact is presented; and the third involves artworks that advance more than one meaning, thus undercutting the authority of any one over another. By 1965 interchange between these modes comes to a halt, as arguments emerge that make differences between artistic viewpoints into stark polarities. Naming abusive acts of viewing each required an interpretative act of its own, which proved the self-same poetic essence of art to be a construction, one needing the advocacy and arguments of rhetoric.

Since the dissertation I continue to use Burke's understanding of tropes as fluid modalities to try to pry apart and make relational and interactive synecdoche and metonymy, rather than allowing them to be collapsed, which opens the way for the dualism that rhetorical analysis too often gets reduced to - namely, a reduction to metaphor and metonymy. As Genette and others have stressed, it is by means of this reduction that rhetoric has been modernized and subsumed within Saussurian linguistics and mapped onto the paradigmatic and syntagmatic poles of language. Thus simplified, these dyadic terms then get superimposed onto a number of ideological oppositions: between vertical and horizontal, monological versus dialogical, sublimating analogy versus proximal contact, quasi-religious organicist symbol versus scientistic logical sign, the transcendent up-above versus the immanent here-below. Aside from T. J. Clark (who employs metaphor to think through mediations), historians and critics of modern and contemporary art too often follow Rosalind Krauss and the October group in their imposing upon analysis a postmodern standoff between the idealist optical and the materialist index or informe. I believe that, in contradistinction, the tropic schema developed by Burke (and echoed in more recent work on metaphor by Ernesto Laclau and Gayatri Spivak) can help situate analysis of artworks in more complex, heterogeneous social and political discursive formations.

Lane Relyea, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Northwestern University
(847) 491-2096
lrelyea@northwestern.edu

Ruggerio, Alena Amato. “How Interpretation Becomes Truth: Biblical Feminist and Evangelical Complementarian Hermeneutics.” Diss. Indiana University, 2003. (Directed by Robert L. Ivie of the Department of Communication and Culture.)

Many evangelical Christian readers forget that when reading the Bible, they see only black marks on a white page that gain meaning in the process of socially constructed interpretation. Instead, their perceptions of the nature of the Bible are affected by language-based persuasive devices such as a cluster of sensory metaphors to appeal to “what the Bible has to say” and “what we see clearly” in the text that masks the human agency and room for disagreement in the act of interpretation.

Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy A. Hardesty, authors of the representative text of second wave biblical feminism, All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today (1992 3rd Ed., Eerdmans), disagree with their counterparts Wayne Grudem and John Piper, authors of the representative text of complementarianism, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (1991 Crossway), about the role of women in the evangelical church and family. Both sides of the gender role debate use strategies such as the sensory metaphor system, the language of formal argument, personification, and dualisms to persuade their readers that their exegesis of the Bible, a polysemous text, is the one correct truth of Christianity. Evangelical audiences resonate with attempts to disambiguate the Bible into one literalized truth because they share the hermeneutical assumptions of infallibility, plain reading, and unacknowledged human agency that add authority to their interpretations of the sacred text.

Kenneth Burke provides the rhetorical framework to explain the use of literalized linguistic systems in the process of reifying an interpretation into a terministic screen. These rhetorical acts seek to reduce the complexity of the Bible into a singular, simplistic, uniform meaning. Metaphors such as the sensory cluster can be used to close down the meanings of texts, but Burke also argues that metaphors can open up the text for different interpretations. Burke offers a way to challenge exegetical reductionism by seeing the space where text, reader/interpreter, and community interact as a place for multiple, complicated possibilities.

Burke adds theoretical support for the productive critic to advocate for sexual equality by uncovering evangelical rhetoric as interpretive. This symbolic approach to biblical interpretation broadens both the complementarian and feminist terministic screens until they reach consubstantiality, embrace the historical richness of evangelical Christian hermeneutics, and enable a change in the material situation of women in the evangelical churches.

I am preparing a manuscript for William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company with the working title Theapalooza: The Rhetoric of the Next Generation of Biblical Feminism utilizing Burkean approaches to dramatism and metaphor to propose Christian feminist advocacy through rhetorical in addition to theological means, a perspective uniquely emphasized in the third wave of the evangelical egalitarian movement.

Alena Amato Ruggerio, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Communication and Interim Director of Women’s Studies
Southern Oregon University
Alena.Ruggerio@sou.edu

Rutland, Laura E. “Hindrance, Act, and the Scapegoat: William Blake, Kenneth Burke and the Rhetoric of Order.” Dissertation: University of Tennessee, 2003. (Directed by Nancy Moore Goslee of the English Department.)

This study employs Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory to examine scapegoating and sacrifice in William Blake’s works from the 1790s. It argues that Burke and Blake are antinomian thinkers who share two major ideas: a belief that scapegoating is pervasive in human culture and that it is intrinsically linked to systems of symbolic order, particularly when those systems become rigid and exclusive. The study also establishes two other major points. It demonstrates the importance of sacrifice and scapegoating throughout Blake’s opus, not just in the late prophecies. It also traces the development of Blake’s ideas about order and sacrifice through the 1790s, from a rejection of order as an unjust and violent imposition on human personality and culture, towards a more Burkean position which recognizes that symbolic orders are unavoidable. In a discussion of The Four Zoas, the study shows Blake striving to create a Burkean dialectic, in which the quest for ultimate values can be pursued in a self-consciously flexible and ever-changing symbolic order.

While the dissertation focuses primarily on a reading of Blake, it contains much to interest a Burke scholar. The first chapter includes a 28-page theoretical overview, which explicates the relationship between scapegoating and symbolic order in Burke by synthesizing material from A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and The Rhetoric of Religion, as well as other Burke texts. Each chapter includes one or more segments exploring how specific Blake texts treat scapegoating and symbolic order as compared to Burke. Ultimately, the project is significant for Burkeans because it provides a reading of Burke that highlights his ideas about dialectic as a means of curbing the scapegoating motive and his importance as an antinomian thinker who does not engage in unrealistic attempts to reject order altogether.

My recent research includes an article, “The Romantic in the Attic: William Blake’s Place in Kenneth Burke’s Intellectual Circle,” to appear in Jack Selzer and Robert Wess’s book, Kenneth Burke and His Circles, forthcoming from Parlor Press. This article examines the references to Blake in Kenneth Burke’s novel Towards a Better Life and in The Rhetoric of Religion. At CCCC in 2007, I presented a paper entitled “Kenneth Burke and The End of Faith: Religion in an Age of Terror,” which compares the rhetoric about religious violence in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith to Burke’s approach in The Rhetoric of Religion. At the upcoming Kenneth Burke Triennial Conference, I will continue with the theme of religious violence in a paper entitled “Transcending Sacred Violence: Perspectives on Burke and Girard.” Within the coming year, I plan to revise and submit for publication both the CCCC presentation and a dissertation chapter on Burke’s scapegoating theory in Blake’s The Book of Urizen.

Laura E. Rutland, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Gannon University
(814) 871-7532
rutland001@gannon.edu

Walch, Mary Pelak. “A Burkean Analysis of the Early ‘truth’ Anti-Tobacco Campaign.” Dissertation: The Pennsylvania State University, 2004. (Directed by Thomas W. Benson of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences.)

This dissertation analyzes the persuasive strategies of the early Florida “truth” anti-tobacco campaign through a Burkean lens. The campaign’s rhetorical move from an anti-smoking to an anti-tobacco approach appeals to youth by redirecting youthful rebellion toward the tobacco industry. By developing a campaign that opposes the tobacco industry, the “truth” campaign shifts the locus of responsibility from the individual smoker (mortification) and places the blame with the tobacco industry (scapegoating). This dissertation argues that the campaign’s anti-industry message resonates with youth because it constructs its audience in a manner that coincides with the way they see themselves, as competent young people who can make informed decision on their own behalf. Several types of mediated texts from the first two years of the “truth” campaign were analyzed, organized by media type. Chapter two criticizes television commercials, chapter three analyzes “Secrets,” a two-minute film trailer that was released in theaters and on television, and chapter four examines the earliest “truth” website.

At the heart of the analysis is an argument that has been put forth by other rhetorical critics: given the option of placing blame on ourselves (mortification) or others, we prefer to place the blame somewhere else (scapegoating, transcendence). The efficacy of structuring the “truth” campaign as an anti-tobacco campaign is that whether or not young people smoke, they can lash out at a corporate entity that has profited from death, disease, and addiction of others. Other key Burkean terms that animate the analysis include identification, synecdoche, and hierarchy.

In several of Burke’s critical essays that employ scapegoating, such as the “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” the group that is scapegoated is innocent. This leads to the question, is it still considered scapegoating when the individual or group, in this case, the tobacco industry, is actually guilty? This dissertation argues that it is scapegoating, despite the innocence or guilt of the party that is scapegoated. Relying on the “pseudoscientific” type of scapegoating, the “truth” campaign projects ills onto the tobacco industry, without considering the kinds of impact family members, peers, celebrities, or other groups may have. Scapegoating is envisioned as a framework that emphasizes the guilt of an external group without addressing whether that guilt may be shared by others.

This rhetorical criticism draws from Burke, rhetorical critics relying on Burke’s writings, health campaign research, and writings on the rhetorical audience. The key concepts from Burke’s writings revealed how the campaign functioned as both a youth-oriented health campaign and an anti-corporate rant. Burke’s explanation of an audience’s motives partnered very well with social scientific research that addresses the kinds of messages that persuade young audiences. This research reinforces its application to the understanding of health campaigns and anti-corporate rhetoric.

The third chapter of this dissertation, which analyzed a two-minute film trailer, will be published in the Spring 2008 edition of the Florida Communication Journal under the title, “Secrets [of a Tobacco Executive]: Using Burke to Reveal the ‘truth’.”

Mary Pelak Walch, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Florida Gulf Coast University
(239)590-7149
mwalch@fgcu.edu

Weiser, M. Elizabeth. "Word Man at War: The Development of Kenneth Burke's Dramatism." Dissertation: Texas Christian University, 2004. (Directed by Ann George of the English Department.)

"What am I but a word man?" While Kenneth Burke's work on human relations, A Grammar of Motives, has most often been discussed in relation to other possible generating or derivational theories, or in its pedagogical potential, Burke's own approach, beginning with a grammar before attempting his planned rhetoric and symbolic, argues for a more ontological method, and one based in language theory. My dissertation offered an extended analysis of Burke's public and private writing just prior to and during the Second World War—work that led to both The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) and A Grammar of Motives (1945)—as rhetorical action emerging from and responding to the conversations of his circle of "word men" as they confronted the problematic role of art during war.

In the Introduction, I argue that Burke came to his understanding of dramatism in part because of his increasingly critical dialogue with those who would become the first generation of New Critics—Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom. Chapters One and Two place Burke in the midst of the "literary wars" between Esthetes and Marxists and show how The Philosophy of Literary Form proposes a "battle plan" for poets and critics to diagnose society through literature. Chapters Three and Four analyze the pressures exerted by the Second World War and Burke's response: A Grammar of Motives that detailed a methodology to understand the ambiguities of motivation and so to transcend physical divisions with language-based mergers. The Grammar aimed to "purify war" not by opposition but by ironic transcendence.

I conclude by analyzing why the Grammar failed to achieve its hoped-for goals in the immediate post-war years and why this moment may be a more propitious time to reexamine Burke's vision—to recontextualize his rhetorical scene in order to shed light on our own.

Burke is absolutely central to this extended study of dramatism, as is the rhetorical theory he promulgated in A Grammar of Motives. However, it is not a historical study as much as an argument for the manner in which dramatism developed as, first, a conversation among the literary critics of the day and, second, as a conversation whose focus was, more often than we commonly acknowledge, the Second World War and the various intellectual responses possible to it.

In the dissertation, I began to make the argument that a full understanding of dramatism would need to see it as both a kind of new criticism variant and as a response to war. I argued specifically that this new critical war response was most fully realized not in the pentad alone but in the whole trajectory of A Grammar of Motives, from presentation of a methodology for linguistically transcending war to exploration of the consequences of—and hortatory plea for—such symbolic action. To do so, I examined not only the Grammar and Philosophy of Literary Form, but Burke's public/private conversations with the so-called "word men" of his time, considering his writing always as a materially contingent response to an ongoing dialogue and including a variety of lesser-studied works in the Burkean corpus, including particularly his wartime work for the Popular Front journal Direction. My purpose was to engage rhetoricians in a two-pronged reexamination of their position in the academic community—first as colleagues with their literary/theorist compatriots and second as engaged intellectuals in a world at war.

My book Burke, Words, War: Rhetoricizing Dramatism is due out from the University of South Carolina Press this fall (2008). It extends dramatically the work of the dissertation by vastly increasing the research, more strongly honing the argument, and examining more closely the implications of my own methodology in undertaking this study—arguing that "rhetoricizing" a universally applied theory such as dramatism can yield insights from its historically contingent origins which enrich—or even alter—our use of the theory in the present. The book is also just much better written.

An article based on my book research, "Burke and War: Rhetoricizing the Theory of Dramatism," Rhetoric Review 26.3 (2007): 286-302, was awarded honorable mention for the Theresa J. Enos prize for best articles of 2007. My co-authored article "Beyond a Rhetoric of Shame: The Dialogic Narrative and Comic Correction," JAC 27.3 (2008, forthcoming), uses Burke's comic corrective to explore (with a psychologist and a creative writer) the pedagogical potential for a more dialectical approach to the personal narrative. My article "Rene Wellek and Kenneth Burke: Prague Influences on Modern Rhetoric," forthcoming from Litteraria Pragensia, considers the impact of Rene Wellek's 1942 article "The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art" on Burke's discussion of the intrinsic/universal and extrinsic/historical duality in literature—an eventual key consideration in his dramatistic understanding, and a cornerstone of my own approach to "rhetoricizing" theory. I am finishing articles within the next six-eight months on Allen Tate's role in the scope and reception of Burke's Grammar, Burke's philosophical stance of "falling on the bias" across arguments, and—as an extension of my book—the conversations swirling around Burke's development of identification in A Rhetoric of Motives. Then I'm turning to something completely new and beginning a book on communal identification through national museums.

Elizabeth Weiser, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy
The Ohio State University
weiser.23@osu.edu

White, Zachary. “Re-Examining Kenneth Burke on ‘Identification’ in the ‘New’ Rhetoric.” Dissertation: Purdue University, 2003. (Directed by Karen Whedbee of Communication Department.)

The concept of identification—the “key” term of the “new” rhetoric—is perhaps one of Kenneth Burke’s most well-known and appreciated contributions to rhetorical theory and criticism. Current understandings of Burke’s identification have oftentimes conceived of this “key” term through the restricted lens of the “old” rhetoric. In an attempt to clarify identification’s role in the “new” rhetoric, this study traced the evolution of Burke’s thinking on the subject of identity from his first major work of non-fiction, Counter-Statement (1931), and through the more mature discussion of identification and division culminating in A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) and “Rhetoric—Old and New” (1967).

The central lesson drawn from this project is that the “key” term of the “new” rhetoric is not an abstract and unchanging concept. Specifically, Burke’s preoccupation with “health” and “sickness” served as a blueprint for the development of his hyper-critical attitude necessary for the artist as citizen keeping watch over the “health” of his/her interpretations and participation in a “diseased” culture. When applied beyond the context of literature, Burke’s concepts of identification and division provide a prescriptive social vocabulary concerned with the “health” of our interpretations as evidenced in the proper governance of the self acting in society.

What distinguished Burke from other artists and thinkers early in the twentieth century was his translation of the artist in the image of the hypochondriac. Throughout his life (as evidenced in published and unpublished writing and correspondence from the Burke Collection), Burke demonstrates a preoccupation with “health” and “sickness.” Whereas hypochondriacs concerned themselves with incipient forms of illness and disease in the body, the artist, according to Burke, would seek out incipient forms of disease in culture to unearth disorders of social thought and belief. As such, the hypochondriacs’ “professional vigilance” and persistent doubt normally reserved for the context of physical “health” served as the model for Burke’s emerging conception of the role and function of the artist in society.

Given Burke’s preoccupation with “health,” a reexamination of other key terms in Burke’s corpus thought to be associated with the “old” rhetoric assume new and important significance when analyzed and understood using the lens of “health.” For example, Burke’s articulation of the “comic” frame using the principles of homeopathy illustrates his concern not with eliminating disease, menace, uncertainty, etc., but with how, as artists, we can translate the “poisons” of participation into creative opportunity and insight.

Finally, this study investigated the importance of “division” in the “new” rhetoric as an