Stephen's blog

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.

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…

The Mind’s Eye

Title Information

Oliver Sacks. The Mind’s Eye. New York: Knopf, 2010. 288 pages. ISBN: 978-0307272089. $27.00

[Large Print Edition. ISBN: 978-0739378038. $27.00]

[AudioBook, Unabrdiged. Read by Oliver Sacks and Richard Davidson. ISBN: 978-0739383919. $35.00]

Summary

1.  In short, the human mind is fascinatingly complex.  This is especially true in the relationships between thought and sensory perception, as well as language and thought.

In the Introduction to Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, William Rueckert says, “If we want to know what Burke’s never-published  A Symbolic of Motives is all about, what his dramatistic poetics consisted of, we have to work our way through all three of his versions of it and sort them out to try to determine the transformations that the original conception of it went through and why, as David Cratis Williams has argued, Burke was never able to settle on any single conception of what A Symbolic of Motives was to be” (xiv).  This strikes me as both a necessary and a prob

This blog post is a departure from the customary discussion of the reading, but some of my “reading” from the past week was too good not to discuss here.  More specifically, that “reading” came in the form of an excellent 4Cs panel on Kenneth Burke.

Below is my working (Rough) Draft for the text of the 2-Minute Burke video.  The following is also a link to a very short animation test sequence.  Please feel free to make suggestions.  While these projects are always somewhat organic, the medium chosen here makes late-edits difficult, thus prompting my early post of my draft.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4k9K6M46fA

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(voiceover) TEXT:

My project remains a “2-Minute-Burke” video and I believe I am making progress on the verbal and visual components.  I am working from general and specific understandings of Burke in order to produce a video that gives the viewer a notion of Burke as a notable Thinker, both generally and specifically.

Coming out of Burke’s work in the 1930s, during which Burke had explicit ties to Leftist programs, PLF again raises some important re-considerations of capitalism.  Burke contends that “under capitalism this basic integration between work-patterns and ethical patterns is constantly in jeopardy, and even frequently impossible” (316).  The symbolic, cultural hegemony of capitalism (such as in everyday vernacular), he says, “tricks” people into only asking “what is good for business” instead of ever asking “what is business good for?”

I will invariably talk about  animal communication more when we reach (in Language as Symbolic Action) Burke’s “Definition of Man,” which has oft been simplistically repeated, excluding non-human animals from the realm of “symbol-users.”  Very early in Philosophy of Literary Form, however, Burke gives us the tools to understand animal communication through his language of symbolism, even if unintentionally in his discussion of literary criticism.

For my individual project, I will produce a multimedia synopsis of Burke’s work, in the form of a “Burke-in-two-minutes” video.  The content of the video may include any of the following – text, audio, video, and animation.  Such content may be originally created, and may also include remixed/sampled content (copyright respected).