[Xmca-l] Re: A contribution of value, I hope

[David Kellogg]

Anthony--

I shared it with my ex-grad. (I am marrying her in the fall--I mean, I'm
marrying her to somebody else; when you are a professor in Korea, you are
often called on to perform the actual ceremony, so long as you haven't had
too many marriages of your own). She is doing a PhD in early years at the
University of Regina in Canada, and she has the usual problem: you can't
just ask questions about what the kids are thinking or saying or even
doing, because the thing you are interested in studying isn't all there
yet. Her super, selected on the same basis as we select people for wedding
ceremonies here in Korea, is a successful questionnaire-and-survey person
and doesn't see this is a problem.

I think Burke's metaphor is really like studying a narwhal by analogy with
a unicorn, or a dinosaur as a kind of Chinese dragon. Burke wants us to
understand something real and concrete like the relationship between lit
and crit simply by thinking of something completely unreal and
impossible--a kind of academic pugilism where there is neither beginning
nor end and nothing is at stake but "tenor". It's interesting that he uses
the word "tenor" to describe seizing the tenets of an argument by
grabbing one side or another rather than grasping the issue as a process
from beginning to end. "Tenor" is the term Halliday uses to mean the
interpersonal back-and-forth of a context as opposed to its
representational or textual qualities.

But doesn't Burke's metaphor really preclude what Nikolai describes so well
in his video? As Nikolai says, you gotta start BEFORE the process is
underway if you want to understand the process as a whole, you need to
grasp it causally and dynamically and not just grab who's in
and out; you need to consider the process as becoming something and not
just  being and being and being. All three of these conditions are
explicitly denied by the Burkean parlor metaphor, aren't they? .

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Ud9nP0Wfd21IyOKhvifoZ9EITAift85La2K_iFgYk5BCRbGVioK-XSnKy-ifYICj5d1_yg$ 
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
Works* *Volume
One: Foundations of Pedology*"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!Ud9nP0Wfd21IyOKhvifoZ9EITAift85La2K_iFgYk5BCRbGVioK-XSnKy-ifYICMY966cA$ 


On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 12:35 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
wrote:

> In our 8th grade classroom, we have used Burke's (1941) "parlor" metaphor
> to support work on literary themes, argumentation, media analysis,
> role-playing, and class discussion:
>
> "Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others
>> have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a
>> discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is
>> about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them
>> got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all
>> the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide
>> that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.
>> Someone answers you; you answer him; another comes to your defense;
>> another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or
>> gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your
>> ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour
>> grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion
>> still vigorously in progress." Kenneth Burke, *The Philosophy of
>> Literary Form*
>
>
> In 1996, Russell Hunt, Gordon Wells, and others had an interesting xmca
> exchange on the topic of "Burke's Parlor," including Hunt's observation
> that "Gordon's narrative, which I think I prefer to Burke's, leaves out the
> agnostic character of the discussion: in Burke, writing in 1941, the
> assumption was that the conversation HAD to be a contest."  I don't think
> it does.
>
> Whether contest, dialogue, dialectic, or mere background noise, I hope
> this latest conversational turn is a contribution of value:
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEK3JV1Ux_5WEs1bAjoH_AXCxFMVAF6bF__;!!Mih3wA!Ud9nP0Wfd21IyOKhvifoZ9EITAift85La2K_iFgYk5BCRbGVioK-XSnKy-ifYICbX5WDxA$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEK3JV1Ux_5WEs1bAjoH_AXCxFMVAF6bF__;!!Mih3wA!S7ys-XdCYKh3HU5OKRoNJuEgk62EmIhOla1afIpa9D1qrvWwtfoGFtCYeUPWbash32dSWA$>
>
>
> As a non-expert, I have been trying to learn in public, and I can promise
> that your current or future students will find this helpful. If this
> statement sounds reasonable, please feel free to share.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Anthony
>
> P.S. The two videos in the playlist are on the longer side; there was no
> way around that.
> While not a substitute, this collection of 2-3 minute snippets does
> contain a fair amount of overlap:
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEK3JV1Ux_5W2ZfG2I-J7prbfDUK_dIlo__;!!Mih3wA!Ud9nP0Wfd21IyOKhvifoZ9EITAift85La2K_iFgYk5BCRbGVioK-XSnKy-ifYIDBZ8SRSw$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEK3JV1Ux_5W2ZfG2I-J7prbfDUK_dIlo__;!!Mih3wA!S7ys-XdCYKh3HU5OKRoNJuEgk62EmIhOla1afIpa9D1qrvWwtfoGFtCYeUPWbat46QJmlQ$>
>
>
>
>
>
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