To Burke or not to Burke

--that is the question.

I admit some real difficulty on my first (ever) reading of Kenneth Burke. I think part of the impediment was my continual, internal question: but how can I use this? I know that Burke’s work has been profoundly influential. Other rhetoricians have built on his theories, continuing his influence. With all my perplexed thoughts after reading the selection, Landis’s class discussion interested me. But then he told us we likely would generate more questions than answers. And I think we did. Apparently, I was not going to get the one easy answer I was looking for. However, one “breakthrough” came for me toward the end of class when Landis argued for pure theory—that theory itself has value, not only theory plus application.

One influence I noted is Burke’s description of rhetoric as “the use of language to form attitudes and influence action” (1295) (emphasis mine). Most rhetors before Burke that we studied certainly considered rhetoric as capable of influencing action, but I think this is the first time the idea of forming attitudes is mentioned.

I would like to read some of Burke’s literary criticism theory. Maybe I will make that one of my light winter-break readings. The intro information talks about his work in criticism as having aspects of reader-response criticism, which I am inclined toward. The authors point out that Burke found literary pieces to be “best understood by their effects on readers” (1295) and that rhetoric is the tool for understanding literature or any other discourse. Literature analysis interests me far more when I can consider the intersection of the text with my experience(s), i.e., reader-response. From my earliest years as a reader, I cannot recall reading any text without having that reading generate questions throughout the event. Sometimes they have been as simple as, how do I feel about this? Or, why does this matter to me? Other times, I (maybe subconciously) go further and wonder about why I relate, or occasionally fail to relate, to a character or a circumstance. I prefer examining literature as an ongoing, recursive, and interactive event rather than as a static, distant artifact or specimen. And I can see how Burke’s proposition of terminal screens plays into the interactive, recursive act of that type of literature study.