This website is the archival copy of the ENGL 680B website from Fall 2007, taught by David Blakesley at Purdue University. All commenting and other interactive features have been rendered inactive since the class no longer meets. Visitors are free to review the course materials. It was a great class!

D.B.

Here's Marc Santos's smart and fun project on KB, John Locke, and David Hume meeting up on Dr. Phil:

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mcsantos/burke_locke/script.htm

Enjoy!
Dave

Here's the "official" call for proposals and papers for KBS 2007. Note the deadline of Feb 1 . . .

Dave

***
Dear Educators, Researchers, and Scholars;

As an individual who has shown interest in rhetorical study or the works
of Kenneth Burke himself, I cordially invite you and your undergraduate
or graduate students to submit original research to present at the
seventh triennial conference for the Kenneth Burke Society, scheduled
for June 29th through July 1st, 2008 and proudly hosted by Villanova
University. The submission deadline for completed papers and panel
proposals is February 1, 2008.

Paper submissions are open to scholars who integrate any of the works of
Kenneth Burke into their research, regardless of academic discipline.
As the premiere organization devoted to the life and works of Burke, the
KBS conference features strong, innovative scholarship on Burkean themes
and subjects. I invite you to contribute your voice to this year's

It's time to introduce ourselves, so I'll start:

I'm now in my seventh year here at Purdue, and I have enjoyed every minute of my time here. Before 2000, I taught at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, for eleven years. My "home" is probably Southern California, where I spent all my time in grad school at SDSU and USC. I've been reading and writing about Burke since I first read A Grammar of Motives in William Covino's "Modern Rhetorical Theory" class in February, 1984 (wow, now that dates me a little bit). I knew then, though, that something was going on with Burke that I needed to know more about, and so there you have it.

This semester, I'll be working on a few Burke-related projects: a conference proposal for RSA and then a paper for the big Burke conference next summer at Villanova. I'm working with Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber to get their new edited book done later this fall, Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke. That should be exciting. The project is nearly finished, so we'll have some sort of release party when the book is here.

Here's something about the "other" me (we are a parliament of voices, after all): I love astronomy and am looking forward to the day when I can build an observatory in my backyard and have a giant telescope. I made an observatory when I was 16, but it was a dud, so I have to try again sometime before too long. In the meantime, there's always "the rhetoric of astronomy."

Cheers,
Dave