LY #89 Burking

Today I taught Burke's Pentad for the first time ever.  I used material lifted from Rhetorica.net for an overview and then lifted a picture from elsewhere on the web as an illustration.  After that, I gave a VERY brief overview of how the concepts of Act, Scene, Agent, Agency and Purpose might be applied to an analysis of  “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”

Act:  Showing of a television commercial
Scene:  The date/social setting of the commercial (Super Bowl 2010, then Youtube)
Agent: Portland ad agency Wieden+Kennedy
Agency:  Film (actor choice, imagery, all aspects of film language, music, etc etc)

Purpose:  To sell Old Spice but also to increase fame of ad agency. 
  
(As a bonus, I talked about this particular advert as a "meme")

Once we start reading Understanding Comics I'll give them a homework assignment of analyzing a particular comic or comic strip.

When I was leaving Utah I would have been surprised if anyone had told me that I would probably not talk about Kenneth Burke in a classroom again for another 25 years.  The main reason, of course, is that the work of this wonderful scholar simply hasn't been appropriate for most of what I do.

But it was Burke's Rhetoric of Motives that actually got me interested in going on in communication study.  We had to read some of it in a rhetoric course at Idaho State.  The prof in the course didn't like the old man but thought we should have a taste.  When I read Burke I felt as though he was talking from inside of my head.  He saw almost all actions as persuasive.  I'd never read that point of view before.  I'd always heard that persuasion was a conscious act of verbal argument.  But my experience of persuasion was that people and text were always pushing me somewhere or calling me to be something.  Burke's concept of "identification" helped me to understand how texts called to me.

While I was at Utah I took an entire quarter in Burke from the brilliant Christine Oravec.   The introductory text we used in the weed class, Introduction to Human Communication, quoted Burke's definition of the human. 

A page from Language as Symbolic Action (p. 16) by Kenneth Burke, out there in Google bookland.

But after Utah, I found little reason to use Burke's ideas in my freshman and sophomore classrooms.  But just this once, before I leave, I thought I'd give it a go.   

I will write more about the wonders of Kenneth Burke in a later post.