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I’m not really much of a Burkean. What I knew about Burke when I sent in my proposal for this conference could practically be counted on the fingers of one hand (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose—the terms of the pentad), along with the other passage from Burke that is commonly cited, the parable of the parlor conversation. But he keeps popping up in relation to an area that interests me greatly right now, the topic of performance, which I believe is a promising concept for reshaping the teaching of writing so as to involve students more in understanding and making use of rhetoric.
I hope primarily to make a case for the relevance and importance of studying visual rhetoric as a means of teaching writing. I want first to position this approach within composition studies; second, to describe the problem to which it may work as a solution; third, to demonstrate its application in a recent course which I taught; and finally, to point to additional directions beyond that semester’s work. In some ways this is a bit removed from Kenneth Burke; in others, Burke runs all through it.
Media provide a large proportion of the texts our students are exposed to, and consciously or not, a lot of what they understand as the purpose and function of rhetoric. Rather than walling all this off, which we cannot do if we want to, we would do better to offer them a model for analysis, interpretation, and response which involves producing their own texts by means of the evolving forms of communication newly available. What I advocate is that we adopt something like Burke’s idea of dramatism for the purpose of understanding both the texts in circulation through media and student-produced texts for college writing classes and other purposes as performances. (Performances are actions which are self-conscious, shaped, purposeful, bounded in space and time, kairotic, and available to be judged by generic criteria.)