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.

Creative Nonfiction

Last night I was inspired by Greg Lyons' nonfiction class.  Not by their work (I'm not privy to that), but by the reasons they gave for doing that work.

I asked them to talk about the "best thing" about writing but by the time the assignment slid onto the third row, the students were saying "what I like best about . . ." or "what I enjoy about . . ." rather than "the best thing."  Was this because they had an innate or encultured  realization that they couldn't honestly speak for everyone?  Or was it because they've (we've?) grown up in a culture which assumes that the individual is special and, in some consumerist Kantian way, thinks, "I am the measure of all things."

Well, in America, we have the socially and legally negotiated "God-given" right to pursue happiness so why not measure the world like an artist in the movies, forever peering past and beyond an upraised thumb?

from ArtGraphica.net

But back to how they inspired me.  (Yeah, that's a sucky transition.  So sue me.)

They told me that writing was important and enjoyable because it allowed access to the subconscious, provided a way to speak one's truth, provided access to the pleasure of moving characters around, and because they had to.   Sadly, this last has never been my gift.  Unlike the great graphomaniacs -- Isaac Asimov, Joyce Carol Oats, Kenneth Burke, Stephen King -- I don't find writing addicting or soothing.  I find it annoying, difficult, and hard on my lower back.  So, I'll have to go with those students who said that they wrote to tell their truths and to get access to the subconscious.

The question for me is, is this blog the place to do that?