RCID 813: Kenneth Burke

I apologize for any formatting issues. I just copied and pasted.

A Community of Interference: Pure Persuasion and Its (Dis)Contents

Parabolic Tale, with Invocation

The Excursion

Scherzando

It has been a great semester, All.  For me, it closes out with the delivery of the following URL:  www.YouTube.com/2MinuteThinker   

I have launched this YouTube channel as a resource for those wanting to view and/or create short summaries (2 Minute summaries!) of particular Thinkers or Major Works.  Educators wanting their students to "get their hands dirty" making some digital media can use this as an assignment in class, which will hopefully result in a large collection of user-submitted summaries.

  “Thanks to the computer, a notable idealistic dimension has been added to what would otherwise be a pretty sorry show” (19).  

Rhetoric and poetics now seem like my right and my left arms.

I’m right handed and  my interest in artful compositions is more prominent in my work thus far—so I’d say that for me: poetics is my right hand.

Rhetorics, now pluralized, undergirds poesis, as Burke argues—and Jared has already observed—they are inside of one another.

Ahh, finally I “get to” speak directly about animals.  As if I haven’t been doing so indirectly throughout the semester of blog posts.  But alas, Burke “Definition of [Hu]Man” provides the launching pad I have waited for…

Title Information: Anderson, Dana. Identity’s Strategy: Rhetorical Selves in Conversation. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. 209 pages. ISBN: 978-1570037061. $39.95.

Summary

·       Identity is important to rhetoric not because of what identity “is,” but because of what it can suggest about language’s function in a strategic and generative process.

It really is quite remarkable what our species has achieved. To develop the knowledge to transform base elements enherent to the planet into rockets, computers, plastics etc. is pretty mind blowing when you sit and ponder it. Burke's satire within "Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision" helps to illustrate the reality that we rarely see all of what we invent, when we are inventing it (Ulmer in EM, via Virilio pg. xii).