Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke<\/title><\/p>\n<style>\n<\/style>\n<\/meta><\/head> \n<body bgcolor=#FFFFFF class=\"Normal\" lang=EN-US><\/p>\n<div class=Section1>\nTo \n Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nby Angelo Bonadonna, \n Saint Xavier University<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n(Delivered at the National \n Communication Association Convention, Chicago, Illinois, November 12, 2004)<\/span><\/p>\nNearly thirty years ago, \n in the summer of 1975, Burke confided to Cowley,<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<div class=LongQuoteIndent style=\"line-height:200%\">The thing is, Malcolm, since Libbie cleared out, I have quit putting \n out my books. For two reasons: the second is that she helped \n so much by having been a secretary; the first is that she helped so \n much by my being so crazy about her, I was driven to prove, prove, prove, \n only roundabout to the shitten world, because so directly every day and \n night to her<\/u> I was appealing. (6\/9\/75)<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class=Section1>\nIn this praise of Libbie \n as Muse and secretary, we see Burke’s typical "both-and" dialectic: \n the consummation of Idea and Matter, or Purpose and Agency, or action and \n motion, transcendence and immanence, Libbie as Soul-mate, Libbie as Body-mate. \n The decline and death of Libbie roughly coincide with the publication of Burke’s \n last book, Language as Symbolic Action<\/u>, so one is tempted to take Burke’s \n elegant praise as an accurate statement of his publishing motives.<\/span> <a href=\"#_ftn1\"\nname=\"_ftnref1\" title=\"\"> [1] <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/p>\n<div class=Section1>\nThe trouble is Burke did \n continue to publish, and rather voluminously, (however volume-lessly, in terms \n of a single book). In all, Burke wrote reviews, essays, poems, postscripts, \n replies, and countless letters; he dabbled in music composition, delivered \n talks, granted interviews–in a word, he verbalized–and with the kind of \n scope and energy typical of any other period in his life.<\/span><\/p>\nHow might we best characterize \n this last and very productive stage of Burke’s verbalizing? Limiting \n the task, as I intend, to just one segment of Burke’s public writings, the \n forty-plus critical essays of the post-Libbie, post-LSA era, will probably \n ease the difficulty but slightly. Regardless of how one chooses to discuss \n or narrow him, Burke defies convenient pigeonholing, and this elusiveness \n of his has gone far towards enhancing his celebrity status among postmodern \n critics. On the other hand, Burke himself never tired of pointing out \n that the language using animal is a classifying<\/u> animal, so it seems \n only natural for us to come to terms–to find the right name for this Last \n Phase of Burke’s career.<\/span><\/p>\nThe earlier periods of his \n life are more or less loosely defined by decade: the teens present Burke \n the Flaubert, the literary aesthete in New York City; the twenties gave us \n the literary critic, music reviewer, short story writer and novelist; the \n thirties added a literary theorist beneath the critic, and threw in a post-depression, \n quasi-socialist social theorist; the forties give rise to a language \n philosopher; the fifties a rhetorician; the sixties a logologer.<\/span><\/p>\nSuch a list, while it suggests \n the scope of Burke’s speculations and their development from literature through \n human relations to language theory, presents a rather hollow version of Burke. \n It leaves us with mere titles, which, as Burke himself might remind us, are \n always inadequate when left to stand in their naked, oversimplified generality. \n Our search here must not merely be for a name<\/u> for the period, but for \n a suitable strategy<\/u> for appreciating the full complexity of all that \n is subsumed in that name. Burke said language not only enables<\/u> \n but requires<\/u> us to approach situations strategically. So as I \n re-read the essays of this period, I kept a running tab of possible strategies \n by which to encompass this most discursive of situations. What I wish \n to share with you today is a log of those strategies in a presentation that \n is perhaps more pastiche than panorama, but one that is nonetheless offered \n as a heuristic for investigating just what to do with these provocative and \n varied pieces of Burke.<\/span><\/p>\nFirst, I thought I might \n take the lead of other Burkean commentators and identify the distinctive nature \n of the late essays. James Chesebro, for instance, identifies 1968 as \n the year that Burke finally gave up his "comedic posture" and got \n into the serious business of ontological inquiry (141). Cary Nelson, \n on the other hand, uses Burke’s late work as the basis for formulating his \n deconstructionist counter-Burke to the humanist Burke of earlier criticism.<\/span><\/p>\nOr in a more humanistic \n vein, I could turn to Bill Rueckert who identifies "the Burke who took \n to the road in the late sixties and has stayed on the road ever since, lecturing, \n talking, reading, thinking on his feet–the critic at large in the most literal \n and Emersonian sense of this phrase, which is: the thinker let loose \n in our midst" ("Rereading" 254). On the road with Kenneth \n Burke–some very inviting possibilities there–a strategy, might I punningly \n suggest, destined to discover just what was driving Burke those many days \n and words.<\/span><\/p>\nMoving along, Strategy 2: \n Treat the final essays as Burke’s attempt to finalize his system. On \n July 19, 1972, Burke wrote to Cowley "Give me but two more years, \n and I’ll prove my point"–though I should point out, as Burke does, that \n he was drunk when he wrote that.<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 3: List and \n characterize Burke’s co-hagglers of the period, from Wellek, Jameson, and \n Howell to Vitanza, Lentricchia, Booth, and McKeon, and everyone in between.<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 4: Compare \n the situatedness of these essay with the situatedness of the earlier works. \n What would Burke the dialectician have been against if he didn’t have technology–the \n perfect scapegoat, since it is so perfectly the caricature, as he says, of \n human rationality?<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 5: Account \n for the temporal progression among the essays or a sub-group within the essays, \n like, for instance, the Helhaven satires. <\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 6: Organize \n by genre.<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 7: Construct \n a concordance of the major recurrent themes, which are as follows: analogical \n extension; catharsis and transcendence; ecology; the victimization \n of nature; or, the infanticidal motive of "Ever Onward" ("Creativity" \n 74); or "technologism," the belief that the solution to the \n problems of technology is more technology ("Communication" 148); \n or, "hypertechnologism"; or, "technological psychosis"; \n or, the irrationality of the excess of rationality; or, the "pandemoniac \n multiplicity" of technology ("Towards Looking Back" 189); \n dramatism as ontology\/logology as epistemology; the trinitarian addition \n of consummation to Burke’s earlier theories of expression and communication; \n entelechy; archetype; consummation as "a kind of creative \n yielding to potentialities which are seen by the given seer to be implicit \n in the given set of terms" ("Poetics" 403); the autosuggestiveness \n of creativity ("Creativity" 77); the compulsiveness of creativity; \n the rounding out of a material operation by a corresponding act of symbolism \n ("Doing and Saying"); substitution and duplication; \n symbolic duplication as cathartic release or entelechial compulsion ("(Psychological) \n Fable"); the attitude of apprehensiveness; psychic immobilization \n ("Eye-Poem"); transcendence.<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy: 8 How about \n cataloguing new moments in Burke lore, as for instance those rare glimpses \n of Burke responding to much more recent cultural and scenic phenomena than \n those commented on in his more established works? A favorite of mine \n is his appreciative but cautionary response to J. Hillis Miller in particular \n and postmodern criticism in general. After discussing Miller’s analysis \n of Hopkins, Burke writes, "This brings out the whole issue in which a \n lot of my colleagues are now interested–that of the marvels of verbal structure. \n But I have to push back now; they’ve brought that out too much. \n People have accused me of just reducing things to words; the whole system \n is absolutely the opposite of that. That is, I make a fundamental distinction" \n ("On Literary Form" 85)–and on he goes into his action\/motion dualism. \n Most certainly, Burke does not reduce things to just words. His environmentalism–or \n anyone’s for that matter–is only logical if we grant that there is indeed \n something outside the text.<\/span><\/p>\nCertainly the most songful \n of strategies would be to cull aphorisms from the readings. Burke credited \n Libbie as the inventor of the Flowerish, and when she passed, so too did the \n art form for Burke. But, glancing through the readings, one can readily \n spot traces of the erstwhile flourish. For example: "no construction \n without destruction" ("Communication" 137); "the \n driver drives the car, but the traffic drives the driver" ("Why \n Satire 311); "Organisms live by killing ("Communication" \n 136); "We are happiest when we can plunge on and on" ("Towards \n Helhaven 19); "Spontaneously, what men hope for is more<\/u>" \n ("Why Satire" 320); "Congregation by segregation" \n ("Rhetorical Situation" 268); "Life is a Pilgrimage. \n Life is a first draft, with constant revisions that are themselves first drafts. \n . . . Life is a series of prerequisite courses, in which we are \n all drop-outs" ("Rhetoric" 33); ... [I]n a \n cult of tragedy, one is asking for it" ("Dancing" 27); \n "Language is one vast menagerie of implications" ("Theology" \n 153); Logology’s wan analogue of hope is "the futuristically slanted \n and methodological engrossment in the tracking down of implications, which \n may amount to translating the grand oracular utterance, "Know thyself" \n into "Spy on thyself" ("Variations" 165); and finally, \n my favorite: "Though language does talk a lot, the very essence \n of its genius is in its nature as abbreviation<\/u>" ("(Nonsymbolic) \n Motion" 823).<\/span><\/p>\nA few strategies are implied \n in my title, "To Logology and Back." For instance, we might \n ask just where is Burke going in his development of logology? Accordingly, \n I could clarify "logology," or words about words, by listing several \n of its key components, many of which are "borrowed back" from theology. \n From St. Thomas we get the principle of individuation, which for Burke is \n the body; from God we get godterms; from the Scholastics we get the \n slogan, "Crede ut intellegas<\/u>": Believe that you may \n understand; from St. Paul we get the principle that faith comes from \n hearing–i.e., from doctrine; from the Trinity we get the formal pattern \n of naming. "Logology is vigilant with admonitions" ("Variations" \n 171). all of which circulate about its central question, "What is it \n to be the typically symbol-using animal?" ("Variations" 169).<\/span><\/p>\nBy my title I would also \n suggest, though very indirectly, the possibility that Burke’s development \n of logology is merely one of his last and most thorough defenses against his \n lifelong fear of death. In the interview by Harry Chapin in the early \n seventies Burke mentions his profound fear of death (much stronger when he \n was younger than at that time when he was in his mid-seventies). In \n his essay "The Party Line" he announces an addendum to his "Definition \n of Man," "acquiring foreknowledge of death" (65). But \n it was a letter to Cowley, not the essays or the Chapin film, that first gave \n me this notion of logology as a psychic cure for the fear of death. \n <\/span><\/p>\nFrom early on Cowley and \n Burke defined how each one’s project was motivated. On November 26, \n 1974, Burke distinguishes his project from Cowley’s thus: "Basically, \n I think it would all berl [sic<\/u>, of course] down to a distinction between \n what you mean by \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153literary situation’ as background, and what I would sloganize \n as \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153logological’ context of our poetizings." While Cowley undertook \n the portraiture of a particular generation, Burke would but dabble with the \n particular–a dazzling few pages, for instance, on the formal qualities of \n the ghost’s entrance in Hamlet–as a way to get to general formal principles. \n Cowley’s work would be needed for an informed view of, say, Ernest Hemingway \n or William Faulkner, but Burke’s is required for a fuller understanding of \n any<\/u> symbolic action, from the most mindless yeasaying a demagogue to \n the full reflexive action of a Shakespearean drama. <\/span><\/p>\nBurke would often sloganize \n his project as "Literature in particular, language in general," \n but–especially in the later years–the proportion shifts decidedly to language \n in general. "Language in general," or the "\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153logological’ \n context of our poetizings"–what are these but the deathless realm of \n timeless logic, knowledge, and principles? To the extent that Burke \n has formulated a "logology," an epistemology, a "science," \n or philosophy rather of the general functions of language that apply to any \n particular idiom, has he not indeed transcended death? Burke’s imperviousness \n to critical fads is a sign of partial success on this score. Is the \n study of logology,motivated by an attempt to rise above the deathy realm of \n particulars into a veritable eternity of logical order? Can Burke’s \n ascent to logology be Burke’s way to heaven, without the baggage of religion?<\/span><\/p>\nGetting back to my title, \n what about the "and back" part of it? By this I want to suggest \n the age-old critical question of whether Burke develops at all in his adoption \n of different terminologies or whether he is engaged in writing the same book \n over and over again.<\/span><\/p>\nMany of my strategies come \n to a head in Burke’s statement: "No one could go on making his \n words mean the same, even if he expended his best efforts to make them stay \n put" ("Theology" 185). Does one detect, lurking in this \n statement, a nostalgic desire to keep meaning settled once and for all? \n Perhaps, but it is instructive to juxtapose another provocative comment in \n which he defines the "minimum condition" for symbolic action as \n "the inability of words to \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153stay put,’ as when even a proper name like \n \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Caesar,’ referring to one particular person in history, gives birth to \n such words as \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Kaiser’ and \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Czar’" ("(Nonsymbolic) Motion" \n 813).<\/span><\/p>\nThis matter of "staying \n put" addresses a host of issues, foremost among them being the question \n of whether Burke is a system-builder, and whether or not he viewed the eternal \n flux of language as a benefit or liability. The ambiguities of Burke’s \n attitude are most suggestively intermingled in his "Theory of Terminology," \n an essay which outlines five categories of meaning, Burke’s famous five dogs. \n The dogs cover the important Burkean principles of verbal entelechy, tautological \n cycles of terms, the synecdochic, Freudian, metaphoric, and musical qualities \n of words–in a word all types of verbal transformations that will infuse a \n term with new, opposite, and apposite meanings. At first, Burke’s attitude \n toward the sophistic realities of language seem quite clear:<\/span><\/p>\nI should feel uneasy if I had to keep these various kinds of terministic \n cycles trimly related to one another, so that I might make a composite photograph \n of the lot. Rather, I would turn that whole subject around, and call \n attention to the fact that much of the freedom in man’s capacity for symbolic \n action resides precisely in the range of improvising here open to him, collectively \n shared by all the members of his tribe. (90)<\/span><\/p>\nBut then to illustrate this freedom, Burke offers \n a curious figure:<\/span><\/p>\nA \n cycle of terms is like a cluster of stars. The sky, as viewed from any \n one of such positions, will show a corresponding difference in the distribution \n of the other positions, though they all ultimately form but one single set \n of interrelationships. And it is in this way that a man defies total \n prediction until he is finished. Indeed, prediction is in effect the \n application to living man of parameters derived from the realm of death; \n that is, the possibilities of the future reduced to terms derived from the \n past. (90)<\/span><\/p>\nTypically here, Burke confounds his fluidities with \n some fixities, his freedoms with some parameters, his positionality with an \n Ultimate Position, a single, all-encompassing set of interrelationships. \n <\/span><\/p>\nAswirl in strategies, I \n began to feel the onset of the old logologer’s ailment, counter-gridlock, \n just as I was to begin wrapping up. As matters stand, the only way to \n conclude a paper like this is with yet another question, or, taking another \n route, with a simplifying anecdote to answer all questions. Burke supplies \n an irresistible anecdote in his "Creativity" essay. He writes: \n <\/span><\/p>\nI \n have asked students to write me three pieces, one praising something, one \n inveighing against something, and one lamenting. The students were to \n choose whatever subjects they preferred, for each such exercise. One \n student, choosing but one subject, praised, inveighed, and lamented within \n the range of that one theme alone. ... [W]hat of that \n student who subjected the same topic to three totally different attitudes? \n (78).<\/span><\/p>\nSo, Burke gives me a concluding \n anecdote that ends in a question. But: Did not that student pay \n Burke the most reverent homage imaginable by enacting the very attitude towards \n language implicit in and unifying, though discursively, all of Burke’s writings? \n Has not the mischievous student of a more mischievous teacher come to see, \n if only inchoately, that language requires such liquidity if one would strive \n for "maximum consciousness" (ATH<\/u> 171)? Is not such \n a student on his way to seeing, as Burke clearly did, that language is forever \n doubling reality, forever entitling it; forever changing, forever remaining \n just as it is, forever defining, forever substituting its definitions? \n And finally, is not the good student learning that if language it has the \n power to transport us into the "heaven" of the subtlest theology, \n and uplift us with the pious and beautiful songs of thanksgiving that theology \n inspires, it also has equal power to transcend downwards, as it gives "rise" \n to pollution, bombs, and demagoguery?<\/span><\/p>\nMight I then conclude, tentatively, or with some measure \n of intelligent inconclusiveness as homage to Burke’s attitude, that the same \n liquidity Burke asks for in our attitudes toward life characterize our attitude \n towards Burke himself? Burke now is finished. His works just are, \n and, as he might say, if all his words were obliterated tomorrow, they will \n go on forever having been uttered. They have formed a completed total \n set of relationships, like the stars in the universe. Even if we could \n encompass the totality rather than take partial perspectives on it, the fact \n remains that for us, still in time, his meanings will not stay put. \n That’s the only fitting last word on Burke–a roundabout invitation to more \n words.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\nWorks Cited<\/span><\/p>\nBurke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History<\/u>. Berkeley: \n U of California P, 1984.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Communication and the Human Condition." Communication<\/u> \n 1 (1974): 135-52.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "On \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Creativity’–A Partial Retraction." \n Introspection: The Artist Looks at Himself<\/u>. Ed. Donald \n E. Hayden. U of Tulsa Monography Series 12, 1971.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Doing and Saying: Thoughts on Myth, Cult, and \n Archetypes." Salmagundi<\/u> 7 (1971): 100-19.<\/span><\/p>\n—. Dramatism and Development<\/u>. Worcester, Mass.: \n Clark UP, 1972.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "An Eye-Poem for the Ear (with Prose Introduction, Glosses, \n and After-Words)." Directions in Literary Criticism<\/u>. \n Ed. Stanley Weintraub and Phillip Young. University Park: Pennsylvania \n State UP, 1973: 228-51.<\/span><\/p>\n—. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, \n and Method<\/u>. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "On Literary Form." The New Criticism and \n After<\/u>. Ed. Thomas Daniel Young. Charlottesville: UP \n of Virginia, 1976: 80-90.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "(Nonsymbolic) Motion\/(Symbolic) Action." \n Critical Inquiry<\/u> 4 (1978): 809-38.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "The Party Line." Quarterly Journal of \n Speech<\/u> 62 (1976): 62-68.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Poetics and Communication." Contemporary \n Philosophical Thought<\/u>. Vol. 3: Perspectives in Education, \n Religion, and the Arts<\/u>. Ed. Howard Evans Kiefer and Milton Karl \n Munitz. Albany: State U of New York P, 1970: 401-18.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in My \n Eyes." Critical Inquiry<\/u> 1 (1974): 32-31.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy." Rhetoric, \n Philosophy and Literature: An Exploration<\/u>. Ed. Don M. Burks. \n West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1978: 15-33.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "A (Psychological) Fable, with a (Logological) Moral." \n American Imago<\/u> 35 (1978): 203-7.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "The Rhetorical Situation." Communication \n Ethical and Moral Issues<\/u>. Ed. Lee Thayer. New York: \n Gordon and Breach Science, 1973: 263-75.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Theology and Logology." Kenyon Review<\/u>, \n n.s., (1979): 151-85.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "A Theory of Terminology." Interpretation: \n The Poetry of Meaning<\/u>. Ed. Stanley Romain Hopper and David L. Miller. \n New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967: 83-102.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision." \n Sewanee Review<\/u> 79 (1971): 11-25.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Towards Looking Back." Journal of General \n Education<\/u> 28 (1976): 167-89.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Variation on \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Providence.’" Notre Dame \n English Journal<\/u> 13 (1981): 155-83.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One." \n Michigan Quarterly Review<\/u> 13 (1974): 307-37.<\/span><\/p>\nChesebro, James W. "Epistemology and Ontology as Dialectical \n Modes in the Writings of Kenneth Burke." Landmark Essays on \n Kenneth Burke<\/u>. Ed. Barry Brummett. Davis, CA: Hermagoras \n P, 1993.<\/span><\/p>\nJay, Paul, ed. The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke \n and Malcolm Cowley<\/u>, 1915-1981. New York: Viking, 1988.<\/span><\/p>\nNelson, Cary. "Writing as the Accomplice of Language." \n Simons and Melia 156-173.<\/span><\/p>\nRueckert, William H. "Rereading Kenneth Burke." \n Simons and Melia 239-261.<\/span><\/p>\nSimons, Herbert W., and Trevor Melia, eds. The Legacy of Kenneth \n Burke<\/u>. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n<hr align=left size=1 width=\"33%\"\/>\n<div id=ftn1>\n<a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\"\ntitle=\"\"> [1] <\/span><\/a> \n <\/span>Dramatism and Development<\/u>, \n published in 1972, is more a pamphlet or a pair of essays (two Clark University \n lectures), than a book by the standard of Burke\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s other books.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/body> \n<\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke To Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke by Angelo Bonadonna, Saint Xavier University (Delivered at the National Communication Association Convention, Chicago, Illinois, November 12, 2004) Nearly thirty years ago, in the summer of 1975, Burke confided to Cowley, The thing is, Malcolm, since Libbie cleared … <a href=\"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/archives\/38\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading NCA Presentation on Kenneth Burke’s Late Essays<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-on-teaching-and-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

{"id":38,"date":"2004-11-12T06:14:29","date_gmt":"2004-11-12T11:14:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/bonadonna\/wordpress\/?p=38"},"modified":"2005-08-27T09:42:47","modified_gmt":"2005-08-27T14:42:47","slug":"nca-presentation-on-kenneth-burkes-late-essays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/archives\/38","title":{"rendered":"NCA Presentation on Kenneth Burke’s Late Essays"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nLogology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke<\/title><\/p>\n<style>\n<\/style>\n<\/meta><\/head> \n<body bgcolor=#FFFFFF class=\"Normal\" lang=EN-US><\/p>\n<div class=Section1>\nTo \n Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nby Angelo Bonadonna, \n Saint Xavier University<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n(Delivered at the National \n Communication Association Convention, Chicago, Illinois, November 12, 2004)<\/span><\/p>\nNearly thirty years ago, \n in the summer of 1975, Burke confided to Cowley,<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<div class=LongQuoteIndent style=\"line-height:200%\">The thing is, Malcolm, since Libbie cleared out, I have quit putting \n out my books. For two reasons: the second is that she helped \n so much by having been a secretary; the first is that she helped so \n much by my being so crazy about her, I was driven to prove, prove, prove, \n only roundabout to the shitten world, because so directly every day and \n night to her<\/u> I was appealing. (6\/9\/75)<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class=Section1>\nIn this praise of Libbie \n as Muse and secretary, we see Burke’s typical "both-and" dialectic: \n the consummation of Idea and Matter, or Purpose and Agency, or action and \n motion, transcendence and immanence, Libbie as Soul-mate, Libbie as Body-mate. \n The decline and death of Libbie roughly coincide with the publication of Burke’s \n last book, Language as Symbolic Action<\/u>, so one is tempted to take Burke’s \n elegant praise as an accurate statement of his publishing motives.<\/span> <a href=\"#_ftn1\"\nname=\"_ftnref1\" title=\"\"> [1] <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/p>\n<div class=Section1>\nThe trouble is Burke did \n continue to publish, and rather voluminously, (however volume-lessly, in terms \n of a single book). In all, Burke wrote reviews, essays, poems, postscripts, \n replies, and countless letters; he dabbled in music composition, delivered \n talks, granted interviews–in a word, he verbalized–and with the kind of \n scope and energy typical of any other period in his life.<\/span><\/p>\nHow might we best characterize \n this last and very productive stage of Burke’s verbalizing? Limiting \n the task, as I intend, to just one segment of Burke’s public writings, the \n forty-plus critical essays of the post-Libbie, post-LSA era, will probably \n ease the difficulty but slightly. Regardless of how one chooses to discuss \n or narrow him, Burke defies convenient pigeonholing, and this elusiveness \n of his has gone far towards enhancing his celebrity status among postmodern \n critics. On the other hand, Burke himself never tired of pointing out \n that the language using animal is a classifying<\/u> animal, so it seems \n only natural for us to come to terms–to find the right name for this Last \n Phase of Burke’s career.<\/span><\/p>\nThe earlier periods of his \n life are more or less loosely defined by decade: the teens present Burke \n the Flaubert, the literary aesthete in New York City; the twenties gave us \n the literary critic, music reviewer, short story writer and novelist; the \n thirties added a literary theorist beneath the critic, and threw in a post-depression, \n quasi-socialist social theorist; the forties give rise to a language \n philosopher; the fifties a rhetorician; the sixties a logologer.<\/span><\/p>\nSuch a list, while it suggests \n the scope of Burke’s speculations and their development from literature through \n human relations to language theory, presents a rather hollow version of Burke. \n It leaves us with mere titles, which, as Burke himself might remind us, are \n always inadequate when left to stand in their naked, oversimplified generality. \n Our search here must not merely be for a name<\/u> for the period, but for \n a suitable strategy<\/u> for appreciating the full complexity of all that \n is subsumed in that name. Burke said language not only enables<\/u> \n but requires<\/u> us to approach situations strategically. So as I \n re-read the essays of this period, I kept a running tab of possible strategies \n by which to encompass this most discursive of situations. What I wish \n to share with you today is a log of those strategies in a presentation that \n is perhaps more pastiche than panorama, but one that is nonetheless offered \n as a heuristic for investigating just what to do with these provocative and \n varied pieces of Burke.<\/span><\/p>\nFirst, I thought I might \n take the lead of other Burkean commentators and identify the distinctive nature \n of the late essays. James Chesebro, for instance, identifies 1968 as \n the year that Burke finally gave up his "comedic posture" and got \n into the serious business of ontological inquiry (141). Cary Nelson, \n on the other hand, uses Burke’s late work as the basis for formulating his \n deconstructionist counter-Burke to the humanist Burke of earlier criticism.<\/span><\/p>\nOr in a more humanistic \n vein, I could turn to Bill Rueckert who identifies "the Burke who took \n to the road in the late sixties and has stayed on the road ever since, lecturing, \n talking, reading, thinking on his feet–the critic at large in the most literal \n and Emersonian sense of this phrase, which is: the thinker let loose \n in our midst" ("Rereading" 254). On the road with Kenneth \n Burke–some very inviting possibilities there–a strategy, might I punningly \n suggest, destined to discover just what was driving Burke those many days \n and words.<\/span><\/p>\nMoving along, Strategy 2: \n Treat the final essays as Burke’s attempt to finalize his system. On \n July 19, 1972, Burke wrote to Cowley "Give me but two more years, \n and I’ll prove my point"–though I should point out, as Burke does, that \n he was drunk when he wrote that.<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 3: List and \n characterize Burke’s co-hagglers of the period, from Wellek, Jameson, and \n Howell to Vitanza, Lentricchia, Booth, and McKeon, and everyone in between.<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 4: Compare \n the situatedness of these essay with the situatedness of the earlier works. \n What would Burke the dialectician have been against if he didn’t have technology–the \n perfect scapegoat, since it is so perfectly the caricature, as he says, of \n human rationality?<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 5: Account \n for the temporal progression among the essays or a sub-group within the essays, \n like, for instance, the Helhaven satires. <\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 6: Organize \n by genre.<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy 7: Construct \n a concordance of the major recurrent themes, which are as follows: analogical \n extension; catharsis and transcendence; ecology; the victimization \n of nature; or, the infanticidal motive of "Ever Onward" ("Creativity" \n 74); or "technologism," the belief that the solution to the \n problems of technology is more technology ("Communication" 148); \n or, "hypertechnologism"; or, "technological psychosis"; \n or, the irrationality of the excess of rationality; or, the "pandemoniac \n multiplicity" of technology ("Towards Looking Back" 189); \n dramatism as ontology\/logology as epistemology; the trinitarian addition \n of consummation to Burke’s earlier theories of expression and communication; \n entelechy; archetype; consummation as "a kind of creative \n yielding to potentialities which are seen by the given seer to be implicit \n in the given set of terms" ("Poetics" 403); the autosuggestiveness \n of creativity ("Creativity" 77); the compulsiveness of creativity; \n the rounding out of a material operation by a corresponding act of symbolism \n ("Doing and Saying"); substitution and duplication; \n symbolic duplication as cathartic release or entelechial compulsion ("(Psychological) \n Fable"); the attitude of apprehensiveness; psychic immobilization \n ("Eye-Poem"); transcendence.<\/span><\/p>\nStrategy: 8 How about \n cataloguing new moments in Burke lore, as for instance those rare glimpses \n of Burke responding to much more recent cultural and scenic phenomena than \n those commented on in his more established works? A favorite of mine \n is his appreciative but cautionary response to J. Hillis Miller in particular \n and postmodern criticism in general. After discussing Miller’s analysis \n of Hopkins, Burke writes, "This brings out the whole issue in which a \n lot of my colleagues are now interested–that of the marvels of verbal structure. \n But I have to push back now; they’ve brought that out too much. \n People have accused me of just reducing things to words; the whole system \n is absolutely the opposite of that. That is, I make a fundamental distinction" \n ("On Literary Form" 85)–and on he goes into his action\/motion dualism. \n Most certainly, Burke does not reduce things to just words. His environmentalism–or \n anyone’s for that matter–is only logical if we grant that there is indeed \n something outside the text.<\/span><\/p>\nCertainly the most songful \n of strategies would be to cull aphorisms from the readings. Burke credited \n Libbie as the inventor of the Flowerish, and when she passed, so too did the \n art form for Burke. But, glancing through the readings, one can readily \n spot traces of the erstwhile flourish. For example: "no construction \n without destruction" ("Communication" 137); "the \n driver drives the car, but the traffic drives the driver" ("Why \n Satire 311); "Organisms live by killing ("Communication" \n 136); "We are happiest when we can plunge on and on" ("Towards \n Helhaven 19); "Spontaneously, what men hope for is more<\/u>" \n ("Why Satire" 320); "Congregation by segregation" \n ("Rhetorical Situation" 268); "Life is a Pilgrimage. \n Life is a first draft, with constant revisions that are themselves first drafts. \n . . . Life is a series of prerequisite courses, in which we are \n all drop-outs" ("Rhetoric" 33); ... [I]n a \n cult of tragedy, one is asking for it" ("Dancing" 27); \n "Language is one vast menagerie of implications" ("Theology" \n 153); Logology’s wan analogue of hope is "the futuristically slanted \n and methodological engrossment in the tracking down of implications, which \n may amount to translating the grand oracular utterance, "Know thyself" \n into "Spy on thyself" ("Variations" 165); and finally, \n my favorite: "Though language does talk a lot, the very essence \n of its genius is in its nature as abbreviation<\/u>" ("(Nonsymbolic) \n Motion" 823).<\/span><\/p>\nA few strategies are implied \n in my title, "To Logology and Back." For instance, we might \n ask just where is Burke going in his development of logology? Accordingly, \n I could clarify "logology," or words about words, by listing several \n of its key components, many of which are "borrowed back" from theology. \n From St. Thomas we get the principle of individuation, which for Burke is \n the body; from God we get godterms; from the Scholastics we get the \n slogan, "Crede ut intellegas<\/u>": Believe that you may \n understand; from St. Paul we get the principle that faith comes from \n hearing–i.e., from doctrine; from the Trinity we get the formal pattern \n of naming. "Logology is vigilant with admonitions" ("Variations" \n 171). all of which circulate about its central question, "What is it \n to be the typically symbol-using animal?" ("Variations" 169).<\/span><\/p>\nBy my title I would also \n suggest, though very indirectly, the possibility that Burke’s development \n of logology is merely one of his last and most thorough defenses against his \n lifelong fear of death. In the interview by Harry Chapin in the early \n seventies Burke mentions his profound fear of death (much stronger when he \n was younger than at that time when he was in his mid-seventies). In \n his essay "The Party Line" he announces an addendum to his "Definition \n of Man," "acquiring foreknowledge of death" (65). But \n it was a letter to Cowley, not the essays or the Chapin film, that first gave \n me this notion of logology as a psychic cure for the fear of death. \n <\/span><\/p>\nFrom early on Cowley and \n Burke defined how each one’s project was motivated. On November 26, \n 1974, Burke distinguishes his project from Cowley’s thus: "Basically, \n I think it would all berl [sic<\/u>, of course] down to a distinction between \n what you mean by \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153literary situation’ as background, and what I would sloganize \n as \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153logological’ context of our poetizings." While Cowley undertook \n the portraiture of a particular generation, Burke would but dabble with the \n particular–a dazzling few pages, for instance, on the formal qualities of \n the ghost’s entrance in Hamlet–as a way to get to general formal principles. \n Cowley’s work would be needed for an informed view of, say, Ernest Hemingway \n or William Faulkner, but Burke’s is required for a fuller understanding of \n any<\/u> symbolic action, from the most mindless yeasaying a demagogue to \n the full reflexive action of a Shakespearean drama. <\/span><\/p>\nBurke would often sloganize \n his project as "Literature in particular, language in general," \n but–especially in the later years–the proportion shifts decidedly to language \n in general. "Language in general," or the "\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153logological’ \n context of our poetizings"–what are these but the deathless realm of \n timeless logic, knowledge, and principles? To the extent that Burke \n has formulated a "logology," an epistemology, a "science," \n or philosophy rather of the general functions of language that apply to any \n particular idiom, has he not indeed transcended death? Burke’s imperviousness \n to critical fads is a sign of partial success on this score. Is the \n study of logology,motivated by an attempt to rise above the deathy realm of \n particulars into a veritable eternity of logical order? Can Burke’s \n ascent to logology be Burke’s way to heaven, without the baggage of religion?<\/span><\/p>\nGetting back to my title, \n what about the "and back" part of it? By this I want to suggest \n the age-old critical question of whether Burke develops at all in his adoption \n of different terminologies or whether he is engaged in writing the same book \n over and over again.<\/span><\/p>\nMany of my strategies come \n to a head in Burke’s statement: "No one could go on making his \n words mean the same, even if he expended his best efforts to make them stay \n put" ("Theology" 185). Does one detect, lurking in this \n statement, a nostalgic desire to keep meaning settled once and for all? \n Perhaps, but it is instructive to juxtapose another provocative comment in \n which he defines the "minimum condition" for symbolic action as \n "the inability of words to \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153stay put,’ as when even a proper name like \n \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Caesar,’ referring to one particular person in history, gives birth to \n such words as \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Kaiser’ and \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Czar’" ("(Nonsymbolic) Motion" \n 813).<\/span><\/p>\nThis matter of "staying \n put" addresses a host of issues, foremost among them being the question \n of whether Burke is a system-builder, and whether or not he viewed the eternal \n flux of language as a benefit or liability. The ambiguities of Burke’s \n attitude are most suggestively intermingled in his "Theory of Terminology," \n an essay which outlines five categories of meaning, Burke’s famous five dogs. \n The dogs cover the important Burkean principles of verbal entelechy, tautological \n cycles of terms, the synecdochic, Freudian, metaphoric, and musical qualities \n of words–in a word all types of verbal transformations that will infuse a \n term with new, opposite, and apposite meanings. At first, Burke’s attitude \n toward the sophistic realities of language seem quite clear:<\/span><\/p>\nI should feel uneasy if I had to keep these various kinds of terministic \n cycles trimly related to one another, so that I might make a composite photograph \n of the lot. Rather, I would turn that whole subject around, and call \n attention to the fact that much of the freedom in man’s capacity for symbolic \n action resides precisely in the range of improvising here open to him, collectively \n shared by all the members of his tribe. (90)<\/span><\/p>\nBut then to illustrate this freedom, Burke offers \n a curious figure:<\/span><\/p>\nA \n cycle of terms is like a cluster of stars. The sky, as viewed from any \n one of such positions, will show a corresponding difference in the distribution \n of the other positions, though they all ultimately form but one single set \n of interrelationships. And it is in this way that a man defies total \n prediction until he is finished. Indeed, prediction is in effect the \n application to living man of parameters derived from the realm of death; \n that is, the possibilities of the future reduced to terms derived from the \n past. (90)<\/span><\/p>\nTypically here, Burke confounds his fluidities with \n some fixities, his freedoms with some parameters, his positionality with an \n Ultimate Position, a single, all-encompassing set of interrelationships. \n <\/span><\/p>\nAswirl in strategies, I \n began to feel the onset of the old logologer’s ailment, counter-gridlock, \n just as I was to begin wrapping up. As matters stand, the only way to \n conclude a paper like this is with yet another question, or, taking another \n route, with a simplifying anecdote to answer all questions. Burke supplies \n an irresistible anecdote in his "Creativity" essay. He writes: \n <\/span><\/p>\nI \n have asked students to write me three pieces, one praising something, one \n inveighing against something, and one lamenting. The students were to \n choose whatever subjects they preferred, for each such exercise. One \n student, choosing but one subject, praised, inveighed, and lamented within \n the range of that one theme alone. ... [W]hat of that \n student who subjected the same topic to three totally different attitudes? \n (78).<\/span><\/p>\nSo, Burke gives me a concluding \n anecdote that ends in a question. But: Did not that student pay \n Burke the most reverent homage imaginable by enacting the very attitude towards \n language implicit in and unifying, though discursively, all of Burke’s writings? \n Has not the mischievous student of a more mischievous teacher come to see, \n if only inchoately, that language requires such liquidity if one would strive \n for "maximum consciousness" (ATH<\/u> 171)? Is not such \n a student on his way to seeing, as Burke clearly did, that language is forever \n doubling reality, forever entitling it; forever changing, forever remaining \n just as it is, forever defining, forever substituting its definitions? \n And finally, is not the good student learning that if language it has the \n power to transport us into the "heaven" of the subtlest theology, \n and uplift us with the pious and beautiful songs of thanksgiving that theology \n inspires, it also has equal power to transcend downwards, as it gives "rise" \n to pollution, bombs, and demagoguery?<\/span><\/p>\nMight I then conclude, tentatively, or with some measure \n of intelligent inconclusiveness as homage to Burke’s attitude, that the same \n liquidity Burke asks for in our attitudes toward life characterize our attitude \n towards Burke himself? Burke now is finished. His works just are, \n and, as he might say, if all his words were obliterated tomorrow, they will \n go on forever having been uttered. They have formed a completed total \n set of relationships, like the stars in the universe. Even if we could \n encompass the totality rather than take partial perspectives on it, the fact \n remains that for us, still in time, his meanings will not stay put. \n That’s the only fitting last word on Burke–a roundabout invitation to more \n words.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\nWorks Cited<\/span><\/p>\nBurke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History<\/u>. Berkeley: \n U of California P, 1984.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Communication and the Human Condition." Communication<\/u> \n 1 (1974): 135-52.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "On \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Creativity’–A Partial Retraction." \n Introspection: The Artist Looks at Himself<\/u>. Ed. Donald \n E. Hayden. U of Tulsa Monography Series 12, 1971.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Doing and Saying: Thoughts on Myth, Cult, and \n Archetypes." Salmagundi<\/u> 7 (1971): 100-19.<\/span><\/p>\n—. Dramatism and Development<\/u>. Worcester, Mass.: \n Clark UP, 1972.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "An Eye-Poem for the Ear (with Prose Introduction, Glosses, \n and After-Words)." Directions in Literary Criticism<\/u>. \n Ed. Stanley Weintraub and Phillip Young. University Park: Pennsylvania \n State UP, 1973: 228-51.<\/span><\/p>\n—. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, \n and Method<\/u>. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "On Literary Form." The New Criticism and \n After<\/u>. Ed. Thomas Daniel Young. Charlottesville: UP \n of Virginia, 1976: 80-90.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "(Nonsymbolic) Motion\/(Symbolic) Action." \n Critical Inquiry<\/u> 4 (1978): 809-38.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "The Party Line." Quarterly Journal of \n Speech<\/u> 62 (1976): 62-68.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Poetics and Communication." Contemporary \n Philosophical Thought<\/u>. Vol. 3: Perspectives in Education, \n Religion, and the Arts<\/u>. Ed. Howard Evans Kiefer and Milton Karl \n Munitz. Albany: State U of New York P, 1970: 401-18.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in My \n Eyes." Critical Inquiry<\/u> 1 (1974): 32-31.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy." Rhetoric, \n Philosophy and Literature: An Exploration<\/u>. Ed. Don M. Burks. \n West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1978: 15-33.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "A (Psychological) Fable, with a (Logological) Moral." \n American Imago<\/u> 35 (1978): 203-7.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "The Rhetorical Situation." Communication \n Ethical and Moral Issues<\/u>. Ed. Lee Thayer. New York: \n Gordon and Breach Science, 1973: 263-75.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Theology and Logology." Kenyon Review<\/u>, \n n.s., (1979): 151-85.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "A Theory of Terminology." Interpretation: \n The Poetry of Meaning<\/u>. Ed. Stanley Romain Hopper and David L. Miller. \n New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967: 83-102.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision." \n Sewanee Review<\/u> 79 (1971): 11-25.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Towards Looking Back." Journal of General \n Education<\/u> 28 (1976): 167-89.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Variation on \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00cb\u0153Providence.’" Notre Dame \n English Journal<\/u> 13 (1981): 155-83.<\/span><\/p>\n—. "Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One." \n Michigan Quarterly Review<\/u> 13 (1974): 307-37.<\/span><\/p>\nChesebro, James W. "Epistemology and Ontology as Dialectical \n Modes in the Writings of Kenneth Burke." Landmark Essays on \n Kenneth Burke<\/u>. Ed. Barry Brummett. Davis, CA: Hermagoras \n P, 1993.<\/span><\/p>\nJay, Paul, ed. The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke \n and Malcolm Cowley<\/u>, 1915-1981. New York: Viking, 1988.<\/span><\/p>\nNelson, Cary. "Writing as the Accomplice of Language." \n Simons and Melia 156-173.<\/span><\/p>\nRueckert, William H. "Rereading Kenneth Burke." \n Simons and Melia 239-261.<\/span><\/p>\nSimons, Herbert W., and Trevor Melia, eds. The Legacy of Kenneth \n Burke<\/u>. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n<hr align=left size=1 width=\"33%\"\/>\n<div id=ftn1>\n<a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\"\ntitle=\"\"> [1] <\/span><\/a> \n <\/span>Dramatism and Development<\/u>, \n published in 1972, is more a pamphlet or a pair of essays (two Clark University \n lectures), than a book by the standard of Burke\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s other books.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/body> \n<\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke To Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke by Angelo Bonadonna, Saint Xavier University (Delivered at the National Communication Association Convention, Chicago, Illinois, November 12, 2004) Nearly thirty years ago, in the summer of 1975, Burke confided to Cowley, The thing is, Malcolm, since Libbie cleared … <a href=\"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/archives\/38\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading NCA Presentation on Kenneth Burke’s Late Essays<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-on-teaching-and-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}