The US Intelligence Community's Mathematical Ideology of Technical Communication

Reading historical intelligence community documents primarily through the lens of Kenneth Burke's essay “Semantic and Poetic Meaning,” this article explores the history and stakes of the intelligence community's ongoing commitment to a problematic model of language use. The essay argues that the intelligence community's pursuit of a “mathematical” ideology of language is an attempt to render language “neutral” and to divorce rhetoric from ethics in ways that Burke anticipated, and with negative consequences for the generation of written intelligence reports and national policy decisions.     

The one‐act play in high school dramatics

An exploration of Burke's use of the term “substance” leads to an illumination of his critical theory and practice. Substance as consciousness achieved through verbalization is manifest in three behaviors: naming, forming, and structuring.     

Trends in speech

This article employs Kenneth Burke's notion of interlocked moments to examine the speech, “Sources of Our Strength,” delivered by Senator George S. McGovern on October 11, 1972, at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. A clear rhetoric of change emerges, indicating a quest for redemption as the preeminent motive inherent in McGovern's discourse.     

Epistemology and ontology in Kenneth Burke's dramatism

Kenneth Burke initially established dramatism as a method for understanding the social uses of language. An examination of Burke's major rhetorical concepts—identification, the definition of the human being, the concept of reality, and terms for order—reveals the epistemology of his dramatism as a marriage of paradox and metaphor. However, recently Burke has shifted dramatism towards a philosophy. Three shifts establish a dramatism based upon “act,”; not the tension between “action”; and “motion,”; dramatism that employs language “literally,”; rather than exploiting its ambiguity, and dramatism that is more “reality”; oriented rather than the link that orders and relates “reality”; to our abstract values.     

“Burke's perspective on perspectives: Grounding dramatism in the representative anecdote”

Rhetorical scholars have taken Burke's discussions of the “representative anecdote” in A Grammar of Motives, and have devised from them a systematic procedure for use in criticism. However, I believe that we can read the representative anecdote in a different way‐by examining the work the term does for Burke himself. I suggest that Burke is not offering a method as much as justifying dramatism dramatistically. Ultimately, based upon my reading of the Grammar, I argue that the representative anecdote‐taken in conjunction with the pentad‐supports Burke's claim to provide the most adequate vocabulary for the study of motives.     

Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

This tropological analysis of “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790) argues that Judith Sargent Murray deployed a series of ironic reversals, including an example of Kenneth Burke's “dialectical” irony, to make her famous case for women's capacity to reason. As such, the article elucidates this trope's peculiar rhetorical potential within the context of eighteenth-century debates on female education and investigates how it can function in conjunction with romantic irony. Significantly, Murray deployed romantic irony in order to question her era's commonplace ideas about women's intellectual capacities and conventional female education. She then employed dialectical irony in order to sidestep relativism, playing off and departing from the expanded field of possibilities that romantic irony opened up. In so doing, she cast doubt upon commonly held doubts themselves, questioning the subversiveness normally associated with learned ladies. Through this series of ironic turns, readers were invited to change their previous beliefs and then presented with a clear means of moving forward—thereby opening a path for elite European American girls to be educated in traditionally masculine domains.     

The very model of a modern major (media) candidate: Colin Powell and the rhetoric of public opinion

In the surfacing stage of the 1995 Presidential campaign, media attention was focused on a non‐candidate, Retired General Colin Powell. This study examines the media's justification for such attention, in light of the absence of Powell's public instigation of a campaign. Coverage of Powell as a potential candidate reflects current media practice with regard to speculative reporting and the assertion of objectivity. Application of Burke's pentad to specific coverage in TIME and Newsweek illustrates how the media uses constructions of public opinion to rhetorically justify campaign coverage of a non‐candidate, transferring agency from the candidate to the “Public.”;     

Restoring order: Interpreting suicide through a Burkean lens

This Burkean analysis of suicide notes argues that suicide is motivated by an innate human desire for “Order.” The notes analyzed in this study were composed by individuals who portrayed their lives as filled with much chaos and pain. In Burke's words, they viewed their lives as highly disordered. Their final communiques indicate that they saw suicide as a way to overcome the tremendous feelings of guilt and/or shame associated with that disorder. In a smaller number of cases, the deceased suggested that suicide allowed them to transcend their painful circumstances, thereby allowing them to avoid the assignment of guilt or shame. As the rhetoric of suicide notes reveals, suicide functions as an agency by which their authors believe a sense of “control” can be reestablished and, ultimately, “Order” restored to their worlds.     

Teaching 1, 2, salesmanship 1, 2

Mercy Otis Warren's dramatic sketch, “The Defeat,” portrays some of the heroes and villians in the movement for colonial independence. “The Defeat” capitalized on widely held values, beliefs, and attitudes in the Massachusetts colony and established Warren as an effective propagandist early in the 1770's.     

“The piety of degradation”: Kenneth Burke,the bureau of social hygiene,and Permanence and Change

Kenneth Burke's employment with the Bureau of Social Hygiene informed his rhetorical theory in the 1930s. Between 1926 and 1930, Burke researched criminology and drug addiction and ghostwrote a book for Colonel Arthur Woods, Dangerous Drugs. An investigation of archives indicates that this research left its mark on Burke's Permanence and Change (1935): in particular, Burke's concept of piety can be understood better in relation to the Bureau of Social Hygiene. An account of Burke's criminological research shows that piety, as a rhetorical concept, involves both embodied and discursive acts. Because it involves mental and affective factors, piety forms the basis for metabiology.     

Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget,Kenneth Burke,and Gesture-Speech Theory

This somatic genealogy of Dramatism's core terms—symbolic action, attitude, identification—argues for the importance of keeping rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical pedagogy more closely tied to bodies that generate, induce, and respond to rhetoric. It does so by examining Burke's use of Sir Richard Paget's theory that spoken language derives from the use and development of bodily gestures. An examination of Paget's theory in Burke's early work serves as a jarring reminder that rhetoric is always a joint performance of body and mind.     

Report on the 1984 conference on gender and communication research

This essay maintains that a major shift has occurred in how Kenneth Burke explains symbol‐using. While previously viewing rhetoric as predominantly epistemic, since 1968 Burke has examined human communication as both ontological and epistemic. It is further posited that Burke's conception of symbol‐using is now dialectical, with both ontological and epistemic perspectives simultaneously cast as governing the symbol‐using process. Implications of this epistemic‐ontological view of symbol‐using are outlined for the functions of rhetoric, understanding of Burke's theory of communication, the long‐term effectiveness of Burke's concepts and methods, the literal functions of symbol‐using, the study of mediated communication, reconceiving the definition of a symbol, and for ideological and postmodern criticism.     

Rhetorical counteraction in Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words

However esoteric Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives seems at first glance, it remains highly relevant to our contemporary moment. As a philosophy of rhetoric that centers on the nature of human conflict, it helps audiences interpret the vicissitudes of political warfare with greater precision and insight. The value of A Rhetoric of Motives becomes even more apparent in light of its recently discovered second volume, The War of Words. Together, these two volumes offer a novel method of rhetorical counteraction that helps specialist and non-specialist audiences redress the threat of nationalistic war. Burke's approach to rhetorical counteraction is distinguished by the study of rhetorical devices across history. By approaching these devices systematically, Burke believed he could help his audience reframe their attitude toward evolving political events. The purpose of this article is to present a thorough account of Burke's method so that it can enrich how we teach and engage in public deliberation today.     

Constructing Vocational Identities

Abstract

Social constructionism is identified as a significant movement within contemporary psychology promising a new way of looking at young people constructing their first substantive vocational identities. An existential notion of vocational exploration as a form of personal project is introduced with this being articulated in terms of the dramatic nature of much that happens to young people while clarifying identities. Through an interpretive analysis of four literary and historical texts using Burke's pentad model for explicating dramatic experiences evidence is given of identities in the process of construction. The main gain for vocationalists is clarified as an approach offering ideas on careers‐in‐progress to compliment established approaches on careers‐in‐prospect and careers‐In‐retrospect.     

The association of southern women for the prevention of lynching: Strategies of a movement in the comic frame

Recent debates and writings on Kenneth Burke's frames of reference have gone beyond the predominant tragic frame to explore Burke's preferred comic frame (Carlson, 1986, 1988; Condit 1992, 1994). This study of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930–1942, builds on previous studies of the comic frame to explore four rhetorical strategies available to the comic rhetor. By choosing to operate within a comic frame, the ASWPL became a coalition of white Southern women successful at halting and eventually bringing an end to lynching in the South.     

A report on television speech making

Recognizing the centrality of motives in Burke's rhetorical theory, the authors suggest that the concept has so far not been adequately dealt with. The article begins with an explanation of the pentad, whose elements are “five motivational points of view.” The terms of the pentad can be assigned to the elements in a human event only after an examination of the event; nothing is to be assumed. The authors recognize that others—Holland, Nichols, Fisher, for example—have drawn various connections between the pentad and motives, but each has been too narrow in a different way. The first point to be made is that each element in the pentad is the locus or potential locus of motive forces. Then, acknowledging the suggestion by Ling that each man describes a human situation by featuring and ordering particular elements in the pentad, the authors argue that such featuring implicitly also features the motives associated with those elements. They then speculate about what featuring tells us of various periods in rhetorical history: the renaissance featuring of schemes and tropes, the elecutionary movement, etc., each one emphasizing a different element in the pentad. They conclude that Burke calls for a thorough investigation of all the elements as well as their interrelationships or, ratio, and a synthesis of the results. This advice is immediately taken up by the authors in a lengthy analysis of George Wallace's “stand in the school house door” at the University of Alabama in 1963.     

论日本保育思想的形成、发展及其现状

近代以来,日本的保育事业逐步发展,保育思想也不断发展。今天其《幼儿园教育要领》和《保育所保育指针》的基本思想,就是重视孩子自身的各种感受,重视孩子的嬉戏和生活体验。从"健康"、"人际关系"、"环境"、"语言"和"表现"五个领域规定了比较具体的目标和内容,以确保孩子在各个方面都能够"体验"、"感受"和"享受"各种各样的事情。嬉戏作为孩子的自发的活动,是培养其身心协调发展的基础的重要的学习。日本学前教育机构的工作就是从五个领域指导孩子通过嬉戏和生活体验逐步形成生存的基础,逐步为生存能力的形成奠定基础。     

Nothing Human

In this essay C. C. Wharram argues that Terence's concept of translation as a form of “contamination” anticipates recent developments in philosophy, ecology, and translation studies. Placing these divergent fields of inquiry into dialogue enables us read Terence's well‐known statement “I am a human being — I deem nothing human alien to me” as a recognition of the significance of the “nothing human” for contemporary humanism. By recasting Terence's human/foreign pairing through Freud's concept of the uncanny, Wharram draws a parallel between a “nothing human” that is radically interior to the human subject and an exterior agency of “nothing human” described by actor‐network theory and object‐oriented ontology. Only through an “alien phenomenology” (a concept borrowed from Ian Bogost) dependent on metaphors and translations that are necessarily approximate (or “contaminated”) can we begin to approach this “nothing human.”     

Challenges and Changes: Developing Teachers’ and Initial Teacher Education Students’ Understandings of the Nature of Science

Teachers need an understanding of the nature of science (NOS) to enable them to incorporate NOS into their teaching of science. The current study examines the usefulness of a strategy for challenging or changing teachers’ understandings of NOS. The teachers who participated in this study were 10 initial teacher education chemistry students and six experienced teachers from secondary and primary schools who were introduced to an explicit and reflective activity, a dramatic reading about a historical scientific development. Concept maps were used before and after the activity to assess teachers’ knowledge of NOS. The participants also took part in a focus group interview to establish whether they perceived the activity as useful in developing their own understanding of NOS. Initial analysis led us to ask another group, comprising seven initial teacher education chemistry students, to take part in a modified study. These participants not only completed the same tasks as the previous participants but also completed a written reflection commenting on whether the activity and focus group discussion enhanced their understanding of NOS. Both Lederman et al.’s (Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 39(6), 497–521, 2002) concepts of NOS and notions of “naive” and “informed” understandings of NOS and Hay’s (Studies in Higher Education, 32(1), 39–57, 2007) notions of “surface” and “deep” learning were used as frameworks to examine the participants’ specific understandings of NOS and the depth of their learning. The ways in which participants’ understandings of NOS were broadened or changed by taking part in the dramatic reading are presented. The impact of the data-gathering tools on the participants’ professional learning is also discussed.