I can't take credit for the subject line, or for the assertion that Burke's vision of Helhaven is dystopian--my roommate is planning a dissertation chapter by that name, because Dave suggested it to her. I just think it's way cool and deserves to be communicated

One of the questions brought up by Burke's scarily accurate dystopian predictions is whether it can rightly be termed dystopic. As my roommate has said, just because Kurt Vonnegut was wrong in Player Piano doesn't mean it's not dystopic, since dystopias are all about looking to the future and imagining the scariest future possible (I'm paraphrasing badly, but that's the basic premise).

So, since precognition is not a condition for a dystopia, what can we make of Helhaven on its own terms? What is this dystopic vision? Is there anything left to fear?

The clause that I'm focusing on is inventor of the negative, and more specifically, Burke's discussion of Existentialism. He says:

The Existentialists may amuse themselves and bewilder us with paradoxes about le Neant, by the sheer linguistic trick of treating no-thing as an abtruse kind of something. It's good showmanship. (LaSA 10)

His attitude towards the existentialists is, I think, very interesting, but I wonder how he would feel about Nihilists, since they're people interested not in linguistic play, but in the concept of nothing as having moral, spiritual, and existential (as in pertaining to existence) consequences. I suppose what I'm asking is...why wasn't there a discussion of Nihilism? Burke describes how the concept of "No" and the negative can motivate people in various ways, but not how Nihilism can likewise motivate people. While fascinated by the "era of negativity", he ignores the era's poster children.

For the final project, Maria and I are attempting to digitize and subtitle some of the footage with Burke. Initially, we wanted to tackle the University of Iowa interviews, but in recent conversation with Dave he suggested the smaller 15-minute interview with Burke and his grandson that we watched in class (if permission is granted by Michael Burke). Our intention is to create a methodology for the digitizing and subtitling process, and to get as far along in the process as possible before the semester ends.

The Human Barnyard is all Greek to me.

As some might've suspected, I dutifully went OED-ing, checking for any anomalies within the passage on the Human Barnyard. It was only the second word in that I came across something interesting.

A wrangle, as opposed to the act of wrangling (which has nothing to do with cows in the OED), is an angry dispute or noisy quarrel. It can also be a controversy. The "Wrangle of the Market Place" (RM 23), then, seems to be in line with Burke's earlier analogy of the Burkean Parlor:

I think I've struggled this week in coming up with something to say about Burke's chapter on tropes because I felt a "well, yes, duh," kind of response to most all of his assertions, and it's difficult to discuss things you agree with so well (at least for me).

One such assertion is found on p. 506 in his discussion of metonymy:

"Language develops by metaphorical extension, in borrowing words from the realm of the corporeal, visible, tangible and applying them by analogy to the realm of the incorporeal, invisible, intagible; then in the cours of time, the original corporeal reference is forgotten, and only the incorporeal, metaphorical extension survives (often because the very conditions of living that reminded one of the corporeal reference have so altered that the cross reference no longer exists with near the same degree of apparentness in the 'objective situation' itself) [...]"

Thank you, JKR, for giving me an example of that which Burke speaks of.

It struck me, while reading Burke's take on transformation (being, as others have quoted before me, "out of a great central moltenness, where all is merged...thrown from a liquid center to the surface, where they have congealed"), that Burke is characterizing the material, that from which distinctions are made, as being the same basic material that can be reformed and reshaped, and that this is not unlike a gestalt image.

When Burke describes how A may become non-A:

But not merely a leap from one state to the other. Rather, we must take A back into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor, and on tho a point where it is consubstantial with non-A; then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead. (xix)

I apologize for the late posting, everyone--but at least this way you'll all have something to respond to tomorrow in class!

What struck me most about Burke's discussion of Freud was not his analysis of Freud (which, tangentially, I enjoyed thoroughly), but the way he spoke of psychoanalysis as necessarily being applied to the author (poet), as demonstrated by his analysis of Coleridge. This seems so different from the way texts and psychoanalysis are used today, at least based on my limited experience within lit and film courses for two reasons.

If we think of the tragic and the comic as others have asserted, that is, as frames of seeing, then we can consider that both the tragic and the comic can be frames of seeing the same subject. In the chapter titled "comic correctives," Burke asserts that "the comic frame of reference...opens up a whole new field for social criticism, since the overly materialistic {emphasis his} coordinates of the polemical-debunking frame have unintentionally blinded us to the full operation of 'alienating' processes" (167).

The Burkean take on myth is something that I had not previously considered, as I tend to think of myths as stories, and not necessarily stories that do. It should not have come as a surprise to me that Burke looks at myths not for what they say, but for what they do, and yet it did.

I was glad to see this prompt, since it's one of the more heavily marked up sections in my P&C.

Mrs. Stephen writes: 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)