Dee Drive's blog

"Portraiture" in contemporary composition research

Dee Drive — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:44:06 -0500

For my final project, I am looking closely at the idea of identification. Part of its process seems to be "identifying," or understanding both the material conditions that a certain person or group faces, plus the way they see themselves positioned in the social world. I get the feeling that there Burke is giving us a way to address these issues. In fact, he describes the rhetorical motive of "portraying" as "biography" or even "portraiture":

We can conceive of biography in the most minute sense: detailed
information regarding some particular taxpayer at some particular
time and place. Or, at the other extreme, we can think of the given
work’s “personality” as the snapshot of some one posture that is at least
momentarily typical of “mankind” in general. (43)

Burke's Simple Mystery of the "Appeal" of Text

Dee Drive — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:32:47 -0500

In SoM, Burke , perhaps more explicitly and cogently than in previous works we have read, plays with connections between rhetoric and poetics. Coming from a literature background, I've always been curious about such connections, and why ancient and contemporary scholars on both sides (excluding sophists of both eras)are at such pains to keep them apart. Burke makes a connection between the two in chapter 3 of SoM that seems blindingly obvious in retrospect, but perhaps was never before stated so concisely. On page 38 of SoM, Burke makes this comment about man's love of his own symbolic creation:

instrumentality and language

Dee Drive — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:19:39 -0500

Burke’s fourth clause is that man is “Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making” (13). Burke explains that man’s “natural condition” is his “sheer animality” (13). I think this is an insight that is becoming an evermore prescient as man devises and “moves himself into” some his most abstract tools. As Burke seems to suggest with this passage, tools aren’t just things to pick up and use, they are actually things to inhabit. Burke uses the example of the strange feeling of panic experienced by New Yorkers during a black out. The darkened street, utterly routine in the country, became a strange place haunted with danger in the city.

Dee Drive's final project....thoughts welcome

Dee Drive — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 10:28:31 -0500

One of the main questions of my dissertation project is this: Why is there such a wide gap between student and teacher perceptions of what should be taught in FYC writing classrooms?

I'll have the Barnyard Scramble

Dee Drive — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 10:36:45 -0500

With a side of I wish I understood clearly what Burke is talking about in this passage. From my previous experiences with Burke, however, I can assume some things. I think he used the idea of the Human Barnyard in a book we've read previously (was it Permanence and Change? They're all starting to run together!). If I'm not mistaken, the metaphor has something to do with competing interests and the requirement of identification for cooperation. Each of these metaphors (Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the Wars of Nerves, the War) suggest a kind of cacophonic clashing of interests. Logomachy suggests a battle of words, the War of Nerves a kind of hanging on to ones interests in the face of opposition. But I like "the Scramble" best as a metaphor for what happens when the rubber meets the road (or when human life makes rhetoric necessary and society begins).

Synedoche as representation

Dee Drive — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:45:32 -0400

I thought Burke's analogy of metonymy to reductionism was an interesting one. I have always had a bit of trouble separating synedoche from metonymy...and metonymy from metaphor, for that matter. But, as Burke explains, each of these terms, though not, of course, exactly synonymous, participate in one another.

Metonymy may be treated as a special application of synedoche ... We might say that synedoche stresses a relationship or connectedness between two sides of an equation, a connectedness that, like a road, extends in either direction, from quantity to quality or from quality to quantity; but reduction [metonymy] follows along this road in only one direction, from quality to quantity. (509)

Lava Light

Dee Drive — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:51:26 -0400

After reading the first section of Grammar the image of the pentad has come into sharper focus, not as a kind of wagon wheel as I had, before now, pictured it, but as Burke prefers it, a thing both more massy and less predictable. The analogy makes more sense in terms of invention and rhetorical inquiry. It we use the pentad heuristically (e.g. as an invention tool), it reflects the relatively quick (and imperceptible) geologic processes happening at the center of the Earth. While the gravitational pull of the spinning planet (a kind of exigency) certainly influences how and why things happen in the molten center, its effects are by not predictable, except through a kind of theory (or grammar). When the pentad is used heuristically, it can help generate ideas about how one can discuss the way lava might flow; it gives rise to possibilities that extend exponentially when combined (alchemically) increase exponentially.

Freud the "old pragatist"?

Dee Drive — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:11:49 -0400

Blakesly encapsulates the ideas of the "new pragmatists" (e.g. James, Gunn, Rorty, etc.) as accepting some idea of practicality while rejecting positivism and embracing the the "view that the speaking subject, the philosopher, always already encrypted by history and culture," insight that philosophies may "work" in spite of inherent structural or conceptual contradictions ... despite the acknowledged absence of transcendental signifieds and metaphysical present" (72). Burke describes Freud's "method" as primarily an "essentializing strategy":

Personal Ideology through a Comic/Tragic Frame

Dee Drive — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:48:12 -0400

I know that Burke's Burke's frames are not designed to produce "truth" in some empirical sense, but I wonder if in applying them if something like "untruth" or "less truth" can be one of the effects. The tragic/comic frames seem to apply mainly to agents; those who have agency and, more importantly in this case, intention. Intention is interpreted in two major ways: as well-intentioned but rhetorically "mistaken" or self-serving and rhetorically savvy. In an attempt to understand these frames better, been applying Burke's tragicomic frames to a number of "texts" I've encountered this week. The first is the ongoing "text" of the Brittany Spears saga. In this case, I'm positing the popular media as the agent. The tragic frame might suggest that the popular media is exploiting Spears to sell magazines (quite successfully).

Rhetoric With/Against the Grain

Dee Drive — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:13:24 -0400

I found little to argue with in Burke's speech and was a bit taken aback by his contemporaries' response to it. At first I could not understand why they would argue with a strategy that seems so reasonable and rhetorically savvy. Burke seems like the only adult in the room, the only one who can admit that a revolution must be launched by a dicourse that invites rather than shuns. He sums up an argument Quintilian would be proud of: