Reading the Dissoi Logoi with Kenneth Burke

             Our course readings have ended with Kenneth Burke but his contributions to rhetoric constitute a new beginning for the field. Burke contributes not a reformulation, dismissal, or alteration to the classical canons, which the majority of our theorists have concerned themselves with, but an entirely original theory which answers the basic questions of the discipline in a new way. In many ways, ending with Burke returns us to the questions that we first posed when we read the Dissoi Logoi at the beginning of the semester, where we considered not just what rhetoric is “man” as a category and its relationship to language.

            The Dissoi Logoi begins with the observation that what is good for one person may be bad for another, that what one calls “seemly” another calls “shameful” (B/H 49). Burke begins with this same observation: that the words we use for values are as ambiguous as the values themselves, and that people build entire systems of words and ideologies out of ambiguous value judgments. In the same vein, the Dissoi Logoi does not fight the ambiguity of language, but notes that we make meaning out of it, so much that “the same statement is false when the false is present to it, and true when the true is present to it” (52). Similarly, Burke does not consider ambiguity one of the problems of language, as Aristotle, Locke, Bacon, and most of the theorists we have considered do, but finds in the ambiguity of language fist observations of his theory. In a way, then, we ended with Burke’s “terministic screens,” but we also began with it.

            Positioning Burke at the end of the syllabus, then, makes sense because it returns us to the questions and the texts that started our semester. In terms of historiography, returning to these questions helps us to think of the history of the discipline in non-linear terms, even disrupting the idea of a “beginning” or an “end.” It also helps us to view the development of the field as dynamic and developing, especially when we consider how much Burke departs from the other theorists we have considered.

Our positioning of Burke could be criticized on some of these same grounds, though. In a course which has dealt so much with theorists that have more or less agreed about whether ambiguity in language is a problem, Burke could seem tacked on, especially at the end. Given that the semester is almost over, we do not have time to consider for more than a couple of hours the questions that he raises, his contributions, and the different perspective on basic questions of language that he brings to the field. We pose these questions only to run out of time to discuss them.

I think the course was ultimately well-served, though, by the way Burke has been positioned. I think this was helped by beginning the course with the Dissoi Logoi, because I think it helps us to think of Burke as both an end and a return to the beginning of the course. And in returning to these questions with the knowledge of what we have done, our own reflection on how we have developed as historians of rhetoric is made richer.
 

Brereton and History

Question Three:
Think back to the day we composed a Brereton grid. If the only texts surviving from this era were the ones you traced for the grid, how would you view the teaching of rhetoric and composition in late 19th-century American colleges? What stories would you construct, or did you construct in your grid, that other historians might see to take up?

Looking back on the Brereton grid we composed in class, I would venture to say that the texts included would position the teaching of rhetoric and composition in terms of correctness and taste. Each scholar we looked at, many stemming from the Harvard model, spoke to the value of positioning students into the first year writing course, and the testing that positioned.

I would construct the story of how taste and correctness inform one another as well as how they position the approach to style in writing and elocution. The focus on taste and correctness raises the question of "who's taste?" "what is correct?" and "why"?  Historians could work from our grid to tease of these questions that establish the grey area of the space that on the surface appears to be black and white: correct/incorrect.

Another path of historiography this grid could cultivate is to look at the scholars presented in terms of chronology. For instance, we gridded Hill across a couple of decades. The shifts in his texts could speak to a shift in approach to the teaching of rhetoric and composition in the 19th century. These shifts could reflect a need, the challenges the model was met with, or the realization of new criteria.

If we think about the Brereton grid in connection to our mapping exercise a few weeks ago we could also map a history that speaks to teaching approaches that deviated from the Harvard model based upon the teaching population, the location, and the specific student population that would create a need for deviation.

Finally, the Brereton grid also speaks to the secondary I read by Hawhee that examines the Harbrace Handbook. This handbook, as well as others like it mirror the correctness and taste that informs the historical moment we looked at in Brereton (education in the 19th century). Finding a parallel between the scholarship and the handbook focuses could create another vein of history that could grow out of the Brereton Grid. These handbooks established what was correct, who decided it, and who needed correcting. By looking at the scholarship and the textbooks/handbooks together we could map the challenges that faced taste and correctness.

Brereton and Burke

If I were to look back over the texts that I traced for our reading of Brereton, I believe it would highlight some of my (mis)understandings concerning the current-traditional period (as such things have come to be termed). In essence, I read through these texts the narrative of a change in the focus of education. After "casting off" the robes of classical inquiry, focusing on a well-rounded knowledge of greek and latin, we began struggling with our own vernacular and its place within studies. In this moment (that of the essays included in Brereton) we are witness to a dual transition--that of the resistance toward the Harvard model of composition and a wider systemic resistance to a model of education that seems more to look backwards to the ancients rather than building upon our understanding (which I feel might be one component of the German model). Yet here it is where the conception of writing as connected to literature seems to become solidified.

These voices were mainly advocates for a better awareness of English literature as that which fills a student with knowledge. Yes, personal experience still appears to be of some consequence, but literature has been offered as a surrogate for such meaning. While written works were a source of inspiration and imitation previously in the rhetorical tradition, this moment would seem to separate logical reasoning from style, and though it begins to move away from the extremely limited perspective of rhetoric as flourish, this imitation of style implicitly fuels much of the argument. And it is in this moment that I realize I've managed to view this period largely in terms of the stereotypes I've already decided I hold concerning it.

By framing my reading in my own historical context, I find myself struggling against the combative nature of much categorizing. In much the same way a binary is flawed in its absolute separation, I see myself resorting to classification that attempts to contextualize in regard to a current set of held beliefs...or beliefs of a previous period. Instead, I want to build another narrative, one which doesn't dismiss this period as the dark ages of rhetoric, but as a moment when the goal of education comes into conflict with the goals and reasonings of society. Coupled with the advances of science, technology, and engineering, we see frequent signs of a writing instruction that tries to cater to a new mindset, one of steady acquisition, dating back to (and probably before) Ramism. Because here we have begun dividing the intellectual arts into more rigid categories and unconsciously assigning worth and value. At the time of my selections from Brereton, I can only imagine there must have been a great desire to vindicate and justify the intellectual exploration of great literature and writing while combating a trend toward efficiency, as nearly all the arguments against theme writing resolve around the efforts and energies expended by instructors in comparison to the end results achieved.

Now, I bring Burke into this consideration strictly because his terministic screens might account for some of the challenges faced throughout the entirety of our "modern" history of rhetoric. Because language can be so critical to our understanding and perception of reality, the philosophical differences between each of the authors we read compares equally to the differences in language and terminology as a matter of defining a discipline as nebulous as rhetoric and writing. And so the ways that each scholar envisages writing differs entirely depending upon this context. Ong shows us how each period of thought can be connected with contextual histories stretching beyond the sole province of rhetoric, but the veil of language might be more difficult to pierce. In much the same way a metaphor might implicitly shape a situation or color it in a particular way (intellectual battling as a violent, war-like act), the language employed might also take thought along certain paths, and while looking back at a history we might believe that we have some all-encompassing way of summarizing or positioning a particular theory or theorist, yet our own terministic screens will limit and drive us to contextualize in equally biased ways if we cannot account for how such screens limit and shape discourse. I guess I'm not sure exactly how clear (or unclear) I might be at the moment, but through the reflection and deflection that comes through language, I think it makes perfect sense to end with Burke, as the realization that language can constrain and take symbolic action should make us more attuned to the ways in which the discourse itself shaped the thought of the individuals we read.

Burke helps us make sense of methodologies from the past as well as those of the postmodernity.  For if we jump on board with Burke’s method, if we agree that “Terministic Screens” are not just an impressive idea, but represent a real-world truth about how humans make meaning of our world, and of ourselves through language, then Burke’s method is more than a mere method: it is a discovery. And if we decide it is a discovery--an uncovering or exposing of a “universal” human truth--that we are symbol using animals--then even those rhetoricians who predate him are symbol using animals, whose terministic screens reveal their worldviews which help us to understand their theories as well as their exigencies.

Of course, placing Burke at the end of our course does not make sense by the strictest, most confining measurement, that of chronology. Our “Modern” time period does not encompass Burke, and yet Burke’s ideas about language would challenge our use of the artifice of “Modern,” a terministic screen in itself. 

Conversely, many of the rhetoricians we’ve read and the methodologies and theories we have considered are constrained by cultural, social, economic, and political structures of their time (as are we all). Ida B. Wells, for example, writes about a temporal crisis, as do Margaret Fell, Maria Edgeworth, Grimke, Harper, and Cooper. Arguably, so do the Scots, Campbell and Blair. Each of these other rhetoricians write in response to an exigence, and they attempt to offer, through their theories, some resolution to a problem, or a method for approaching and understanding shifts in some social order. Granted, we can trace their rhetorical theories in their writing, and we can apply these theories to our understanding of logic, thought, style, and how these pertain to writing or addressing an audience, especially their audiences and their specific needs. Burke, on the other hand, offers a theory for understanding language and its use, a lens through which all of these other theories can be understood in ways that need not be linked to any single exigence. For Burke, it seems, the exigence is communication on all levels and for every purpose.

Perhaps if others were to view our course they might first notice the inclusion of Burke and question his inclusion because they might also look at the timeline and see the gap. With further consideration, however, his inclusion makes sense because his theories help us make sense of the ways we understand everything--not just the crises--in our world/s because we are symbol using animals.

History/Historiography Review

Hello, Everyone:

In advance of Thursday's class session, please take some time to quickly review the following texts (and be sure to bring them to class):

• de Certeau
• Graff and Leff
• Royster and Williams
• Enoch or Campbell (depending on what you read)
• Carr, Carr, Schultz
• Brereton

By "review," perhaps my expectation is that you would remind yourself of the main argument and principal claims in each text, a.k.a., the text's agenda and methodology.

Also, I offer in advance some questions that may drive our discussion. Please select one question and spend some time composing a blog post in response, prior to Thursday's class. Your response need not be a full-fledged essay, but it should reflect more than a casual try. In other words, it should put us all in a good enough position to do more with these questions than we might have done earlier in the semester:

1. How is Graff and Leff's understanding of "critical historiography" either complicated by or taken up in (or both) Royster and Williams' project? In Enoch's or Campbell's?
2. What would we name Gertrude Buck's "noetic field" if we were challenged by other historians to do so?
3. Think back to the day we composed a Brereton grid. If the only texts surviving from this era were the ones you traced for the grid, how would you view the teaching of rhetoric and composition in late 19th-century American colleges? What stories would you construct, or did you construct in your grid, that other historians might see to take up?
4. If "Terministic screens" were the primary way we got to know Kenneth Burke as a rhetorical theorist, how could we justify positioning him at the (historical) "end" of our trajectory? In truth, Burke comes much later than the historical "end" of Modernity -- if we want to think of Modernity as an historical movement -- but his essay completes our syllabus nonetheless. Is this viable, or is it misguided? Having read what we have and explored the methodologies that we have, in what ways does ending with Burke make sense? In what ways doesn't it make sense? How would others viewing our course assume we were positioning Burke?
5. Before the semester began, I invited you to read the Dissoi Logoi (B/H 47-55) for several things. If you were to return to it now, what do you know with more certainty than before about some of the issues this text takes up? What does (or what could) the Dissoi Logoi represent to you, as a seasoned historian of Modern Rhetoric?
6.  If you were to return to de Certeau with fresh eyes (albeit tired ones), how would you explain to a novice historian any of his defining statements about "history," "historical discourse," or "historiography" on pp. 19-21, 29-49?
7.  Where might we fall on the "Cacophony of Historiography Theories" handout? Given that the handout was a first draft of what should be a more careful taxonomy, it's possible we don't fit comfortably anywhere, but I'd be interested in knowing what you think defines our historiographic approach to rhetoric studies. What might we call its "watersheds" (see Carr, Carr, Schultz 202-204)? Alternatively, what could we offer future classes as our unique "methodology" (see Carr, Carr, Schultz 205-206)?

I'm really looking forward to this,

-Dr. Graban