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”