Fast Facts

Conference Dates: July 17-20, 2014
Proposal Deadline: January 31, 2014
Proposal Window: October 1, 2013 to January 31, 2014
Acceptance Notification: March 1, 2014
Registration Window: March 1, 2014 to April 1, 2014
Conference Website: http://kbjournal.org/2014conference
Conference Chairs: Paul Lynch (plynch11@slu.edu) and Nathaniel Rivers (nrivers1@slu.edu)

Conference Theme

Attitude mediates action and motion. Attitude is incipient action. Media have attitudes. Media are incipient. We act through media and media act through us. This dance of attitudes, both human and nonhuman, shapes action. Action is always in media res.

Taking both Burke’s attitude and his rhetorical philosophy of technology as points of departure, The Ninth Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society welcomes proposals that focus on attitudes toward technology and technology’s own attitudes. We also welcome proposals that focus on any Burkean subject. The conference will be hosted by Saint Louis University in historic Midtown, home of the Grand Center (http://www.grandcenter.org), the place for the arts in St. Louis, from July 17-20, 2014. Saint Louis University is also home to the Walter J. Ong, SJ, Center for Language, Media and Culture as well as the Ong Archives. In the middle of the country, in the middle of the city, we will grapple with being in media res.

Ghent University
22nd to 25th May 2013
Ghent, Belgium

Enquiries: kbconference@ugent.be
Web address: http://www.cultureeducation.ugent.be/kennethburke
Extended deadline (!) for proposal submissions: February 1st 2013

Confirmed keynote speakers

Barry Brummett (University of Texas at Austin - USA)
Steven Mailloux (Loyola Marymount University, Irvine - USA)
Jennifer Richards (Newcastle University - UK)

Theme

The parlor metaphor? Really? Isn’t that a little obvious? A little too pious?

Sure, it is appropriate: KB Journal is in effect the parlor of the Kenneth Burke Society, the place where the interminable discussion takes place. And it is newly refurbished. Thanks to the painstaking work of Dave Blakesley, the site is everything you’d want in a parlor: it’s inviting, warm, tastefully appointed and productively arranged. Still, a reference to the parlor metaphor on the occasion of the site’s re-launch? Isn’t that a bit clichéd? You’re not likely to inspire much confidence as the incoming editors if that’s the best you can do.

Perhaps. But there are particular passages of the parlor metaphor that seem appropriate to the beginning of our editorship:

When you arrive, others have long preceded you…. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.

Andy King

King: Can you tell our readers how long you have been part of the Burke Society?

J.K.: I was, as they say, there at the founding. I attended the first meeting set up by Herb Simon in Philadelphia in 1984. When the formal organization was completed (by 1987) I joined the organizational structure on the board of directors, and served on the conference planning committee through the 1999 conference that David Blakesley and I planned. Along the way I chaired the Eastern Communication Association branch and the Speech Communication Association branch. So, I have been pretty much continually involved.

King: You and I have been at this for a long time. We remember when Burke was a rather marginal figure in departments of English and Communication. Recently he has become fully mainstream and scholars at the recent Southern Communication convention complained about his hegemony. What do you make of all this fame and expansion and does it surprise you?

Kenneth Burke has been widely praised as one of the sharpest readers of Shakespeare, Freud, and Marx, among others. He was also well known for turning his many book reviews into essays and excursions of his own, in the interest of tracking down the implications of terminologies and concepts, all the while grappling with some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke collects the bulk of his literary reviews, many of them reprinted here for the first time and positioning them as scholarship in their own right. In over 150 reviews, Burke explores poetic, fictional, and critical works to discern the nature of aesthetics, rhetoric, communication, literary theory, sociology, and literature as equipment for living. Along the way, he encounters some of the finest literary and critical minds of his day, including writers such as William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Shirley Jackson, Henry Miller, and Marianne Moore; and critics and philosophers such as John Dewey, J. L. Austin, Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Wilson, I. A. Richards, Denis Donoghue, Wayne Booth, Harold Bloom, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Alfred North Whitehead. This collection organizes reviews across the wide range of fields that Burke engages, including literature, literary criticism, history, politics, philosophy, sociology, and biography.

Michael Burke, Swan Dive. New York: Pleasure Boat Studio, Caravel Mysteries. 2009.

Michael Burke forwarded to us an online review of Swan Dive by Teri Davis. Here are excerpts

Below is the review for Swan Dive. I loved it.

If you were a private investigator, would wonder about a family relationship if a wealthy father hired you to investigate his only son's possible affairs? Added to that, the son is engaged to a wealthy, educated, intelligent, and beautiful woman who appears very proper. Why would he chance that relationship for a one-night stand, or is there another woman who means more to him?

Humanistic Critique of Education: Teaching and Learning as Symbolic Action, edited by Peter M. Smudde. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2010. 268 pages with notes, bibliography, illustrations, and index. Available at Parlor Press: http://www.parlorpress.com/humanistic

“I go about my garden reading passages from the essays aloud! I feel like Walt Whitman braying out Homer on the horse cars. Nearly every sentence is superbly formed. I have never read such a beautifully edited and fluent book. This book enlists rhetoric to help solve the problems of education. I take it as a rhetorician’s call to revive our swooning education system.”--Buck Kartlian, Independent Scholar, Garden City, New Jersey

“Burke’s fifty year old essay is still wet on the hoardings. It roars like thunder in the dawn. The essays that follow Burke’s statement deeply engage such subjects as learning communities, service learning, our obsession with technology, schools as problem solving organizations, routinized creativity for problem solving, student and communal accountai8blity and much, much more.” --Charles Urban Larson, Northern Illinois University

Conducted By Andy King

About David Cratis Williams: David Cratis Williams is a seventh generation Appalachian mountaineer who landed as an Associate Professor of Public Communication at Florida Atlantic University on the flat sands of South Florida in Boca Raton. His study of Burke began in the late 1970's, progressed through several publications on Burke, and continues to this day. He was a funding member of the Kenneth burke Society, served as co-program planner for the Centennial Conference in Pittsburgh with Grieg Henderson (and together they edited Unending Conversations: New Writings By and About Kenneth Burke) and directed the Iowa City Conference. In addition to his work on burke, Williams also publishes in the areas of Appalachian Studies, argumentation, rhetorical criticism, and democratization/democratic renewal. He claims on affinity with Burke: a passion for playing tennis, particularly on clay courts.

Congratulations to the President-elect of the Kenneth Burke Society, Clarke Rountree, whose book Judging the Supreme Court: Construction of Motives in Bush V. Gore has just won the Kohrs-Campbell prize in Rhetorical Criticism. It is perhaps the most rigorous and extended pentadic analysis ever attempted. Theresa Enos of Rhetoric Review said that "it is like reading an eloquent drama complete with script notes."

Bryan Crable's "Distance as Ultimate Motive: A Dialectical Interpretation of A Rhetoric of Motives" won the 2009 Rhetoric Society of America's Charles Kneupper Award, given annually to recognize the article published in that year's volume of Rhetoric Society Quarterly that the editorial board and the editor consider the most significant contribution to scholarship in rhetoric. A deeply insightful new reading of the Rhetoric, the article appears in the summer 2009, volume 39.3 issue of the journal, pp. 213-239.

Swan Dive by Michael Burke Michael Burke has a debut mystery novel entitled Swan Dive coming out September '09. It's been labeled a "Buzz" book at the BookExpo America convention. Here's the blurb--happy reading! Swan Dive focuses on "Blue" Heron, a down-and-out detective with a roaming eye who gets much too involved in a complex business deal, a deal which results in embezzlement, swindling, sexual misconduct, and murder. Along the way, Blue discovers a great deal about himself while trying to understand the subterfuge. For a smart-guy detective, he is extremely naïve and innocent. You might even say he's rather stupid. One of his problems is that he often gets too entranced with whatever woman is nearest to be able to concentrate on the job he's being paid to do. That makes for trouble.