[KB] Teaching Burke

[Edward C Appel]

Burkophiles,

	Back to the timely and needed book proposal made by Ann George and Elizabeth Weiser on Teaching Burke. I said I’d be offering a few shamelessly self-indulgent thoughts on the matter, so here goes.

	My whole book, Language, Life, Literature, Rhetoric and Composition as Dramatic Action: A Burkean Primer, is just such a pedagogical effort. (The tome is available most easily and directly by googling “A Burkean Primer” and clicking onto the first entry that begins with “PDF.” It’s in “Sites at Penn State.” No need to Download.)  Counting Addendum 2 (pp. 371-72) on “The Paradox of Pure Substance,” the book presents and illustrates 35 Burkean, or Burke-related, concepts. I list and briefly summarize 34 of them in the final chapter, before I get into the five most important take-aways, as I call them, conjured by the title of the book.

	Although the Primer is Burkean pedagogy in print form, I include and illustrate some of the ways I’ve used Burke in classroom instruction. For instance, I reproduce a test essay written by “Angie,” analyzing Hawthorn’s Scarlet Letter according to “Disordered Situation,” “Guilt-Obsessed Redemptive Actor,” “Sacrificial Act or Series of Acts” (in this novel, you may recall, there are a lot of them), and “Redemptive Purposes and Means.” Angie was not an undergraduate college student. She was an 11th-grade high school student. Everybody is immersed in drama. I illustrate drama’s ubiquity in Chapter 2 of the primer, on the family/child level, the school/student level, the church-synagogue-mosque-temple/parishioner level, the society/member level, the company/employee level, and the state/citizen level, each with its own unique phrasing of the stages of the generic human drama.

	In the next post, a composition by “Jen” (pp. 262-63). Jen was a trainer for the high school football team. She got into a quarrel with her associate trainer. Jen wrote about it in Burkean analytical terms. Jen is now an orthopedic surgeon, specializing in sports medicine. She was my orthopedist when I broke an ankle just before the Clemson conference. Jen got me up and walking without a boot just in time.



	Ed