Indexing and Dialectical Transcendence: Kenneth Burke's Critical Method

Brigham Young University BYU ScholarsArchive Theses and Dissertations 2012-03-13 Indexing and Dialectical Transcendence: Kenneth Burke's Critical Method David Erland Isaksen Brigham Young University - Provo Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Isaksen, David Erland, "Indexing and Dialectical Transcendence: Kenneth Burke's Critical Method" (2012). Theses and Dissertations. 3091. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3091 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Indexing and Dialectical Transcendence: Kenneth Burke’s Critical Method David E. Isaksen A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree of Master of Arts Gregory Clark, Chair Grant M. Boswell Brian Jackson Department of English Brigham Young University April 2012 Copyright © 2012 David E. Isaksen All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Indexing and Dialectical Transcendence: Kenneth Burke’s Critical Method David E. Isaksen Department of English, BYU Master of Arts Kenneth Burke has been described as arguably the most important rhetorician and critical theorist of the twentieth century, and yet an important part of his scholarship has been generally overlooked by the academic community. The pentad has become the most prominent “Burkean” framework for analyzing texts, yet Kenneth Burke himself preferred “a more direct” way of approaching texts which he named “indexing.” This thesis recreates this method from the pieces found in his scholarly writing, personal correspondence, and the papers his students produced for the class he taught at Bennington College. Kenneth Burke believed indexing could uncover the “pattern of experience” or “motivational structures” a text embodies, and thereby help people become aware of the persuasive power different texts have. The method of indexing has two parts: 1. Finding the implicit equations in a text, and 2. Tracking the hierarchies of terms and God-terms in those equations. Identifying equations in a text starts with finding “key terms” in a text, meaning terms which carry special significance as indicated by their intensity and frequency of usage. One then tracks the context of these terms throughout a text to find which other words frequently occur together with these words. The second step, tracking hierarchies of terms, is done by finding how the terms in the equations relate to each other in a hierarchy. We start with specific and move upward to more general terms. On the top of the pyramid we find the God- term, which is the driving motivation and ground of all possibility in the text. Kenneth Burke hoped his method of indexing could help us understand the power language and motivational structures have to drive human action, and that we could question our own motivational structure as well as that of others and of the communities we operate in. Keywords: Kenneth Burke, rhetorical criticism, indexing, God-terms, dialectical transcendence, patterns of experience, social analysis, linguistics, hierarchies of terms, motivational structures ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my three committee members for their direction and assistance with this thesis. In particular, I would like to thank Gregory Clark for his steady guidance and support during this project, and for introducing me to the writings of Kenneth Burke in his seminars. I would also like to thank Brian Jackson for his thorough comments and suggestions for improvement, and Grant Boswell for his provoking questions. I would like to give a special thank you to Jack Selzer and Sandra Stelts at Penn State for setting me on the right track in my research, as well as all the former students of Kenneth Burke who took the time to share their memories and college papers with me: Ruth “Cookie” Liebling Goldstone, Suzanne Shepherd, Barbara Nowak, Riva M. Poor, Mary Lou P. Schram, Diana G. Valenti, Sheila T. Dobbin, Joan Clifford, and Judith G. Speyer. Many thanks also to Ann Burkhardt, Kenneth Burke’s former colleague, as well as Gretchen Dwyer and Susan D. Corcoran at Bennington College who helped me get in contact with Burke’s former students. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my wife Kaja, without whom none of this work would have been possible. iv Table of Contents ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ ii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Indexing and the Underlying Pattern of Experience ....................................................................... 5 Methodology ................................................................................................................................... 8 1. Indexing................................................................................................................................ 8 2. Tracking Hierarchies of Terms .......................................................................................... 17 Purposes of Indexing..................................................................................................................... 28 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................. 34 Isaksen 1 Introduction The scholarship of Kenneth Burke, according to David Blakesley, has given him the status as “arguably the most important rhetorician and critical theorist of the twentieth century” (vi), and Blakesley calls his influence in some fields, like communication studies and composition, “hegemonic” (vi). Yet, despite his prominence, there is still much debate about his scholarly legacy and specifically about what is perhaps his greatest scholarly contribution: his concept of dramatism. What is dramatism, and what did Burke himself see as the most important elements of it? The concept most clearly identified with dramatism in scholarly literature is the dramatistic pentad. As David Blakesley writes in The Elements of Dramatism, “When the elements of dramatism do make an appearance, they are usually in the form of the dramatistic pentad” (vi). A quick search in the scholarly literature makes it clear that the pentad has eclipsed all other “Burkean” methods of viewing a text, and is frequently used in rhetoric, literature, communication studies, and even organizational behavior. Blakesley goes on to claim that dramatism “has the pentad at its core1” (vi), that the pentad “is the heart of what is now known as dramatism” (5), and that “Burke used the pentad to conduct textual analysis” (34). However, when Burke responds to applications of his pentad to writing pedagogy and critical analysis in “Questions and Answers about the Pentad,” he seems rather reluctant to give it the same status awarded to it by scholars. As for his using the method in textual analysis, Burke contends that although the pentad “affords a serviceably over-all structure for the analysis of both literary texts in particular and human relations in general, I usually begin with more 1 Although he does write that “it works in conjunction with other conceptual systems like rhetoric and poetics to comprise a larger system of intellectual and linguistic study” (vi), and indeed makes that claim a primary purpose of his book, Blakesley still claims that the pentad is the most important element of dramatism and its “central theme” 26). Isaksen 2 direct ways of sizing up a text” (334, emphasis added). In other words, although Burke concedes that the pentad can be used for those purposes, he prefers a different approach to textual analysis which he sees as “more direct.” The method he then goes on to outline corresponds with the method for dramatistic analysis which he described more closely in “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education” (hereafter “LAPE”). Unlike the pentad, this method (often referred to as “indexing”) does not look for ratios and circumference, but rather starts by looking for “equations” within a text, charting the relationships between words. As Jessica Enoch writes in “Becoming Symbol-Wise: Kenneth Burke’s Pedagogy of Critical Reflection,” “Burke names his educational solution ‘dramatistic’. But the dramatistic in this essay is not exactly synonymous with the interpretive system that he famously called the pentad: act, scene, agent, purpose, agency” (281). Moreover, when one reads the essay “Curriculum Criticum” where Kenneth Burke evaluates his scholarly work retrospectively in 1953, it seems like the pentad itself was one of the last elements of dramatism that he discovered and used. Burke claims the essay “The Philosophy of Literary Form,” published in 1941, “aims both to give a summarization of the author’s notions about the symbolic function of literary forms and to sketch a technique for the analysis of work in its nature

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