So here is an attempt at creating a response for today’s readings. Although, I would like to say that it should be viewed as a naïve attempt at this point to understand, because I don’t think I’ve had enough time to completely digest the readings at this point. So here we go:

My initial observation to Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives in some ways leads me to a thought I have been having throughout the semester. If William Rueckert is correct and Burke intended his work on dramatism to be a five part series, then the following observations may make some sense. To begin we first need to read backward. One way to view the five-part work is to think of each piece of the puzzle that we currently have as a hashing out of previously considered ideas (Can’t one see elements of Permanence and Change as well Attitudes Toward History running through his Grammar and his Rhetoric). To this point, and if we are to be considered trained critics able to index and catalogue the development of an author’s ideas and terms, would it not serve our purposes then to look at A Symbolic of Motives as an extension, a complication, and furthering of Burke’s earlier work Counter-Statement. What I’m referring to is the theory of forms as presented in the “Lexicon Rhetorica” and the entire machine itself. Can we not infer that the “symbolic” of poetic “genres” or the tracking of the development of repetitive phrase are divisions of form and the implementation of repetitiveness. I’m also hesitant to say, but can we also say that drawing the complete picture of something in terms of developments in interpretations of author intentions as a machine for analysis and criticism?

Like I said, this is still an early take on the readings, but I’m interested in what everyone else has to say about this?