I think Mark and Clarke's inaugural, introductory essay is superb. They've touched most, if not all, the important bases. (With Burke, I guess, you can never say anybody's touched ALL the bases, but let's not get picky.) The "benchmark" motif from the 1990 New Harmony conference sounds just the right opening note, along with, of course, the parlor conversation metaphor. This scholarly enterprise will begin with Burke, draw on his thoughts and inspiration, ripple out, we hope, in more applied and theoretical dimensions than we can now imagine, then double back for a "reality check" (loosely speaking) with the master. Interpersonal communication is one domain the authors cite that's been relatively fallow from a dramatistic standpoint. There are others.

If there's one statement in the piece I'd quibble with, it's the expectation that one day Burke will be as famous as "Aristotle, Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud." Burke has, to be sure, something of the breadth of Aristotle, the prescience of Nietzsche, the politically critical outlook of Marx, and the paradigm-shattering potential of a Freud. (Who, for instance, had already set forth the most solid and perdurable contributions of postmodern philosophy of language thirty years before those that Burke's epigone, Harold Bloom, called, with just a bit of disdain, "the Frenchies"?) Burke's cast of mind was too mercurial, his style too elliptical and collage-like, his disregard for academic boundaries, which Mark and Clarke take due note of, too thoroughgoing for popular placement on that kind of pedestal. He'll endure, but as something of an intellectual guerrilla fighter, I believe, hurling thought grenades from the hills as much as the halls of academe

I'm running out of space, I think. I'll have more to say about this well-wrought overview later.\r\n\r\n In the meantime, "Onward, Outward, and Up" toward more impassioned and illuminating conversation a la Burke!