Follow the links at the bottom of this page for a schedule of assignments for each week this semester. Within each week, you will find daily listings of assignments. Each bullet point for the day is a different task for you to complete. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all assignments are to be completed before class on the day listed.
This course calendar may be updated throughout the semester. I'll notify you about any major changes, but you are still responsible for keeping up with the current schedule.
IMPORTANT: You must visit all of the links provided within the course calendar. There are many links to follow and read. Make sure you visit all of them. Some links provide easy access to other parts of the class site which will help you in your assignments. Some links are to required readings. Others provide you with detailed instructions on completing the assignments. Eventually, you may come to know the instructions which supplement assignments that are repeated throughout the course, but it's still a good idea to continue to revisit the instructions to make sure that you are satisfying all of the requirements.
Aug 21: Introduction to the Course
On your own . . .
Aug 23: Special Guests
On your own
describe where you are from
give your course of study and year
talk about your academic and professional goals
describe what you would like to get out of this course
share at least one thing personal about yourself (a hobby, your favorite sport, a favorite activity, etc.
Aug 29: The Elements of Dramatism (1-47)
Weekly Reading Response 1: Respond to either questions 2 or 4 on pages 44-45. They're reproduced here for easy reference (and citation). Use this tag (and any others that are relevant) in the categories field: Dramatism.
2. Burke chooses drama as a metaphor for analyzing human behavior, which allows him to approach questions of motives through a lens that emphasizes people as actors using symbols to influence each other and their scenes. A metaphor is a way of seeing one thing in terms of something else. What happens when you think of human behavior not as dramatic, but in terms of chemical reactions or cause and effect, as in psychology? What is involved, for instance, when we say that addictive behavior is the result of chemical imbalances? Or what if we think of behavior in terms of money, as in economics? What is involved, for instance, when we say that people are commodities, human “resources”? Think of some other metaphors that describe human behavior in terms of something else and consider the consequences of such symbolic representations. What difference does it make if you think of a person as a commodity, a consumer, a “change-agent,” a cyborg, a rat, a god, a carbon-based unit, or “describable by the enemy as vermin”? (See Chapter 2 for more on that last one.)
4. In popular usage, rhetoric is often thought of as an act that involves embellishing the truth with fancy language, distorting or over-stating a case, or attacking an opponent. From a dramatistic perspective, however, rhetoric comes into play in every situation that involves people acting on each other through symbols to achieve identification. In what ways can a poem be considered rhetorical? An email message to a parent or a friend? An essay written in a history class? This book?
Aug 31: The Elements of Dramatism (49-95)
Post some follow-up comments to the reading responses of your peers.
Film (on your own): The Usual Suspects
Sept 4: The Elements of Dramatism (93-194)
Weekly Reading Response 2: Respond to one of the questions below. They're reproduced here for easy reference (and citation) from The Elements of Dramatism . Use this tag (and any others that are relevant) in the categories field: Dramatism2.
(pp. 93-94). One of the rhetorical devices that Burke describes is Hitler’s use of the scapegoat mechanism. Burke calls it an error of interpretation because, in Hitler’s case, he offers a non-economic interpretation of economic ills. Hitler attributed the serious economic problems in Europe (and Austria especially) to the influence of a race of people, the Jews, whom he made international scapegoats for widespread poverty. Anti-Semitism had unfortunately been a common form of racism in Europe and even in the United States (to a lesser degree) for a long time, but Hitler channeled it for his even more sinister purposes.
A scapegoat is a person or group of people who bears the blame for others. In tragic drama, such as Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, the hero often acts as a symbolic scapegoat for the audience, who can suffer with the hero and yet not really experience any consequences. (The term tragedy comes from the Greek words for “goat song.”) Psychologically speaking, the scapegoat mechanism can be an effective rhetorical device because it is a form of catharsis, the act of relieving or purging anxiety, unfulfilled desire, fear, pity, or other unsettling emotions. Initially, the scapegoat is identified (named) and identified with, but then we experience a rupture, a division, whereby the scapegoat is left bearing the blame.
Describe a modern-day example of the scapegoat mechanism exemplified as an effective, albeit erroneous, appeal. (Think, for instance, about stereotypical “villains” in popular film.) As Burke notes, the mechanism can also be turned inward as a kind of persecution mania. Would you consider someone like Eminem a scapegoat in this sense? Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight? Former President Bill Clinton? One of his accusers, Linda Tripp or Paula Jones?
2 (p. 130). In an interesting application of dramatism (and terms from dramatic literature), Burke notes in Attitudes Toward History (1937) that people generally take either a tragic or a comic perspective on human motivation. The tragic view holds that people are vicious or evil. The comic view, however, holds that people are mistaken, necessarily mistaken, that “all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness . . . “ (p. 41). Burke preferred to take a comic rather than a tragic perspective on life.
Write an account of a recent situation in which you made an interpretation (of a text, film, event, etc.) that turned out to be totally wrong. What happened? How did you discover that you had been mistaken? What in your training led to the mistake? What role did language play in the situation?
3 (p. ). Popularized by comedian Rich Hall, sniglets are words that should be in the dictionary, but aren't. When a sniglet catches on, it is called a neologism (“new word”). The sniglet bovilexia, for example, refers to the uncontrollable urge to lean out the car window and yell “Moo!” whenever you pass a cow. Sniglets are excellent examples of things as signs of words. The trick is to identify recurrent situations that seem to have no name, then to coin a neologism that would both stand in for it and convey its meaning by using key root terms. Bovilexia, for instance, is the combination of bovine (“cow”) + lexia (“talk”), i.e., “cow talk.” See if you can identify some situations that should be the sign of a word and create some sniglets. Once you have done that, explain in what ways you think writing a poem, a short story, or a novel is like coining a sniglet. Can you explain the relationship?
Film (on your own): Toy Story 2
Sept 6: Counter-Statement (vii – 62)
Sept 11: Counter-Statement (63-122)
Suggested Prompt and Tag: In the Preface to the first edition of Counter-Statement, Burke discusses two general types of writing or rhetorical approach (or even criticism): pamphleteering and inquiry. What's the difference between the two? How might each relate to notions of rhetoric as the study of the use of persuasive resources (rhetorica docens) and the use of persuasive resources (rhetorica utens)? Which way do you think Burke leans, and why? Tag: Pamphlinquiry.
Sept 13: Counter-Statement (123-225)
Note that the readings on Revolutionary Symbolism have been set back to Week 6.
Sept 18: Permanence and Change (Introduction, Prologue, and Parts I and II, i-163). The prompt below was posted late (Monday) so just try to respond by Thursday if you can.--DB
Suggested Prompt and Tag: In Part II, Ch. 3 in the section "Planned Incongruity in Bergson" Burke examines an important function of language that helps establish precedent for a philosophy or art of perspective by incongruity, one he will develop more fully in A Grammar of Motives and the "Four Master Tropes" essay in its appendix. In PC, Burke looks to Bergson (and his commentator, Karin Stephen) for help. What implications for rhetoric, language, or science do you glean from this paragraph? Tag: perspective by incongruity
The events of actual life are continuous, any isolated aspect of reality really merging into all the rest. As a practical convenenience, we do make distinctions between various parts of reality, and by such processes of abstraction, we can even treat certain events as though they recurred, simply because there are other events more or less like them. Each temporal event is new, and cannot recur. We find our way through this everchanging universe by certain blunt schemes of generalization, conceptualization, or verbalization--but words have a limited validity. Their very purpose being to effect practical simplifications of reality, we should consider them inadequate for the description of reality as it actually is." (92)
Burke (via Bergson) uses the example of planetary motion, which is articulated as conflicting centripetal and tangential forces even though the motion simply is what it is (continuous, observable, temporal).
Sept 20: Permanence and Change (Part III, 167-272, Appendix, and Afterword)
Film (in-class): “A Conversation with Kenneth Burke”
Sept 25: Film: The Burke Interviews
Digital Packet: “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” and responses by Gold, Freeman, et al.. The PDF file with these readings is listed below.
Online at KB Journal: “‘We Write for the Workers’”: Authorship and Communism in Kenneth Burke and Richard Wright” by John Logie.
Suggested Prompt and Tag (pick one question or write your own): 1) How would you explain the reception of Burke's speech? How might his use and understanding of rhetoric (somewhat against the grain, as it is) cultivated that response? or 2) What, from a Burkeian perspective, is the rhetoric of myth? How might this understanding contribute to an understanding of rhetoric more generally as social and symbolic action? Identification? Tag: Revolutionary Symbolism.
Sept 27: Film: The Burke Interviews
Oct 2: Attitudes Toward History (Parts I and II, Intro - 175)
Suggested Prompt and Tag: Burke describes the tragic and comic frames throughout ATH. What are they, and what's the difference between them? What frame do you think Burke adocates for and why? Tag: tragicomedy
Oct 4: Attitudes Toward History (Part III, 179 - 434)
Oct 9: October Break.
Oct 11: Digital Packet: Readings from The Philosophy of Literary Form. There are two readings listed below ("Freud--and the Analysis of Poetry") and ("parlorprassages") with material from this book. Try to read the Freud essay by October 16. We'll discuss the "parlor" passages in class together as time allows.
Digital Packet: Blakesley, "Kenneth Burke's Pragmatism--Old and New" (for next Tuesday) and readings from Burke's essays in Direction.
Thought for the day . . .
"[a] rhetorician, I take it, is like one voice in a dialogue. Put several such voices together, with each voicing its own special assertion, let them act upon one another in cooperative competition, and you get a dialectic that, properly developed, can led to views transcending the limitations of each" (Kenneth Burke, "Rhetoric--Old and New" 63).
Oct 16: Readings from The Philosophy of Literary Form. There are two readings listed on the calendar for October 11 ("Freud--and the Analysis of Poetry") and ("parlorprassages") with material from this book.
Digital Packet: Blakesley, "Kenneth Burke's Pragmatism--Old and New" and readings from Burke's essays in Direction.
Discussion of "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle.'"
Prompt for Reading Response: A) What insights does Burke draw from Freud that might help us understand rhetoric better? or B) What's the significance of "purposive forgetting" or C) Burke calls Freud a master dialectician. Using a definition of pragmatism presented in the Blakesley reading, consider why describes Freud in that way. What's dialectical about Freud's methodology or process? Suggested tag: Freudian
Oct 18: Midterm essay due. Reading catch-up day.
Oct 23: A Grammar of Motives (Introduction and 1-124)
Suggested Reading Response Prompt: Burke describes his method in the introduction with the analogy regarding the "molten mass." How might that method reflect his understanding of rhetorical inquiry (or invention)? Tag: molten mass
Oct 25: A Grammar of Motives (Part II: Focus on 127-51, 171-75, 185-201, 209-14, 223-26; 227-74 on “Act”; 275-91)
Oct 30: A Grammar of Motives (311-20; 323-43; 402-46, “Dialectic in General”; Appendices: “Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats” and “Four Master Tropes”)
Suggested Reading Response Prompt: In "Four Master Tropes,” Burke explains the function of each. Choose one of the tropes, and explain how his distinctions help you understand it better or might help us understand rhetoric better. Tag: tropes
Nov 1: A Rhetoric of Motives (Introduction thru Part 1)
Nov 6: A Rhetoric of Motives (Part II: Traditional Principles of Rhetoric)
Suggested Reading Response Prompt: In the early pages of RM, Burke says that rhetoric muse lead us through “the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the Wars of Nerves, the War” (A Rhetoric of Motives 23). What do you make of this unusual passage? Are there any puns or etymologies that might help you explain what Burke has in mind for rhetoric? Tag: barnyard
Nov 8: A Rhetoric of Motives (Part III)
Nov 13: Language as Symbolic Action (Preface thru Part, i - 97)
Suggested Reading Response Prompt: In "Definition of Man," Burke describes the characteristics of the symbol-using, misusing animal. Choose one of the qualities or features, and explicate it. Or, what might Burke leave out? Tag: Definition of Human
Nov 15: Language as Symbolic Action (Read Chapter 6 and then one other essay; recommended "Shakespearean Persuasion")
Nov 20: Language as Symbolic Action (Part III, 294-507); Digital Packet: “Towards Helhaven” (attachment listed below for logged in users)
Suggested Reading Response Prompt: What is Burke's attitude toward "Technologism"? Do you think any of his "predictions" have come to pass? Why or why not? Tag: Helhaven
Nov 22: Thanksgiving Holiday
Nov 27
Catch-Up Reading: Language as Symbolic Action (Part III, 294-507); Digital Packet: “Towards Helhaven” (attachment listed below for logged in users)
Nov 29
Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives (Preface thru Part 1, ix - 73). The PDF ebook is password protected, so ask about that in class.
Suggested Reading Response Prompt: What new issues does ETSM raise that you think should be investigated further? Why? Tag: Symbolic of Motives
Dec 4
Read the three essays (Blakesley, short; Thames, long; Wess, medium) at KB Journal on this book.
Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives (Pick one or two essays of interest in Part II; and then 259-282)Suggested Reading Response Prompt: Burke adds a fourth "office" to the Ciceronian "teach, delight, and persuade" in ETSM. The fourth purpose is "to portray." What do you think he has in mind? What implications do you see for ethics, identification, and/or visual rhetoric? Why? Tag: Portray
Dec 6: Catch-Up with all the course readings by today
Final Projects due by Thursday, December 13 at 4 p.m.