[KB] Teaching Burke

[Edward C Appel]

Burkophiles,

        I’ve used more or less Burke’s standard dramatic pattern in teaching interpersonal relations and composition. For interpersonal, I offer the following guidelines:
1.	Moral problem: miscommunication, serious disagreement, relationship breakdown, a falling out, or alienation.
2.	Cause of this disruption: Blame or fault belongs to whom?
3.	Action taken: self-sacrifice, punishment, humbling, or abnegation of oneself; scapegoating of, punishment of, or aggression toward the other.
4.	Resolution of the conflict: redemption, reconciliation, back together again; or is this drama still unredeemed, are you and the other person still at odds?
Could any of the principles of a supportive communicative style have helped prevent or solve this relationship problem---being descriptive rather than judgmental, problem-and-solution oriented rather than control oriented, spontaneous rather than strategic, empathetic rather than neutral, characterized by mutuality rather than superiority, provisional rather than dogmatic?

        You can read Jen’s brief essay on her falling out, then reconciliation, with 
her partner/athletic trainer Sarah on pp. 262-63 in the Primer, easily accessed at that Penn State site.

	Now, teaching students how to write, Burke-style---there’s a droll conceit, if there ever was one---and why they might consider doing so, is surely a challenge. I start off the chapter on Burke and composition with this short paragraph: “I once received a review of a journal submission of mine that began, ‘You write like Kenneth Burke. Believe me. That is not a compliment.” What was the glaring Burkean defect in my paper the reviewer was likely referring to? What is the unique virtue of Burkean prose that some readers of Burke have noted and applauded? And can those two compositional features be disjoined, or do they go together, like love and marriage (used to, anyway)?

	First, on the apt, plainly necessary, philosophically-consistent side of Burke-speak, I use, as a brief prolegomenon, what Burke has to say in the “Program” chapter in CS. In that chapter, Burke offers an indictment of “certainty,” “dogmatism,” and “perfectionism.” Burke touts in opposition, “democracy” as “organized distrust” and “protest,” “vague, bungling adjustment,” “a doctrine of interference” to the extent there’s a doctrine or “Program” there at all.
\
	Michael Hassett picks up on Burke’s notion of self-“interference” in his article, “Increasing Response-ability Through Mortification: A Burkean Perspective on Teaching Writing” (Journal of Advanced Composition, 15, 1995). Hassett’s prescription: “Mortify the goads toward perfection that arise in my [our] symbolizing,” the hortatory always furtively present in the “negative” as ubiquitous scene in which language holds forth. How do we get around the seductive temptation to act like a bossy, yet at least partially mistaken, “know-it-all.“

	As Burke says in “Program”: “Certainty is cheap, it is the easiest thing of which a man [sic] is capable. . . . Convictions spring up like Jacks-in-the-box. . . . We can depend upon it that even a world rigorously schooled in doubt will be dogmatical enough.” Our journals?

	Anyway, I offer twelve of Hassett’s “mortifications” or self-interferences by which authors can emulate or extend Burke’s “on the other hand” or let’s soften that assertion this or that way.

        Tilly Warnock offers a more balanced view of Burke as model writer in “Reading Kenneth Burke: Ways in, Ways out, Ways Roundabout” (College English, 48, 1986). Warnock finds “indeterminacy,” yes, or self-interference/mortification, in Burke, but equally “determinacy,” or radiation. After working through Warnock’s valuable addition to the question, I go to Burke’s “Symbol as Generating Principle” in CS on ramification and “subtlization” as support for Warnock’s more comprehensive point of view. Without both ramification/radiation/determinacy, on the one hand, as well as self-interference/mortification/indeterminacy, on the other, in Burke’s compositional style, there would be no dramatism/logology, certainly nothing close to what Chesebro has called Burke’s “system.
”
	The upshot is, Burke’s discursive style serves as conspicuous illustration of his philosophy of language. The problem is, does Burke’s equally conspicuous fondness for the elliptical, the collage-like (Tilly Warnock), the nonlinear (Dennis Smith), and the poetic (Marcia Godish) undercut, or complement, the efficacy of Burke’s subtlizations?

	That for later.



	Ed