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Articles Conference Reviews |
C.18 Kenneth Burke’s Writing ProcessC.18 Composing Archival Accounts of Kenneth Burke’s Writing Process As a panel, the presenters constructed a smart, well-balanced and engaging session that blended a perennial subject of interest for rhetoricians and compositionists, the work of Kenneth Burke, with what over the past several years has become a popular methodology in composition scholarship: archival research. I will offer a brief summary of the panel, moving from an overview about the content of each paper to an overall discussion about the panel as a panel. That is, the success of this panel owes much to how it was organized, so I want to tease out several observations about the import of panel composition and how, especially in this case, it can make all the difference for pulling off a successful session. There were three speakers on this panel: Ann George, a tenured professor at Texas Christian University; Kyle Jensen, an assistant professor at the University of North Texas; and Joel Overall, a graduate student at TCU. All three of these presenters were engaged in one way or another with Kenneth Burke’s archival materials and each of them presented papers about Burke as a writer. The exigency of this panel seemed to come not only from a desire to better understand Burke himself as a rhetorician and theorist, but to also garner wisdom about Burke’s writing process and what he might be able to teach us about such things as invention and revision. Ann George opened the panel with her paper “Caught in the Act: The Writing Process of Kenneth Burke.” Currently at work on a critical edition of Burke’s Permanence and Change (P&C), George reported on her experience in the Burke archives and what she has discovered about Burke’s writing of P&C and how the book evolved over several editions (the first of which was in 1935). Elaborating on three examples, George makes the argument that we can better understand Burke’s work, especially P&C, if we know more about how Burke worked as a writer. For example, George points out that nowhere in the original draft of the book does Burke mention his advocacy of communism, which does appear in the first edition. George concludes this was a last-minute addition and then explains how it was removed for the second edition of the book in 1954, thus making for a different kind of text. George also spent several minutes discussing the origins of P&C, and how, as she argues, Burke’s idea of meta-biology might be the central concept on which the book was built even though much of this critical vocabulary is taken out of final drafts. The takeaway of all this, as George noted, is “to see what we can learn about Burke’s ideas by doing what he calls spying on where they came from.” Kyle Jenson’s paper, “On the Future of the Kenneth Burke Archive, A Comment and Proposal,” served as an extension of George’s talk about P&C as well as an argument for digitizing the Burke archive. Jenson pointed out that Burke speaks about his writing process in The Grammar of Motives and that the principles of dramatism take form in these passages. He also discussed how his work with Burke’s manuscripts confirms the conclusion that Bryan Crable made in his recent Knuepper Award-winning Rhetoric Society Quarterly article, namely that Burke did not intend for A Rhetoric of Motives to argue that identification is the primary aim of rhetoric. Finally, Jenson discussed the values and implications for a digital “commonplace” where the Burke archives could be accessed with ease by scholars, and where we could view “mash-ups” of Burke’s various drafts of his books to see how they each grew over multiple revisions. Definitely the most engaging of the three speakers, Joel Overall discussed how we can better learn about Burke’s invention strategies by recognizing him as a multimodal composer. In “Meet Kenneth Burke, Multimodal Composer” Overall pulled from interviews with Burke’s son as well as archival materials such as letters and music notebooks to analyze the role musical composition played in Burke’s life. Apparently Burke spent time everyday on his piano bench improvising music and, as Overall said, “composing his emotions in the aural mode.” The thrust of Overall’s argument is that Burke relied on the aurality of writing in the composition process. Indeed, Burke’s son confirmed that his father would often use the piano as a thinking device, a place where he would go to contemplate alongside music, much of which was improvised. As a composer, Burke also worked music into his discursive texts, and Overall quoted from numerous sources, mostly letters to fellow musicians, where Burke would insert bars of music from original compositions to give his letters an aural dimension. To make his presentation multimodal, Overall recorded himself playing some of Burke’s compositions and demonstrated how they gave his writing an aural quality that often matched the mood of the texts. The archival work these three scholars are pursuing is certainly fascinating and each of their papers testifies to the different levels of knowledge that can be gleaned from studying how Burke worked as a writer. It is fascinating, for example, to consider how Burke responded to the changing political landscape with revisions of his books. If there was anything missing from this panel, perhaps it is clearer explication about the value of this particular kind of archival work for compositionists. I say this not as a critic but as someone who recognizes that there is a strong pedagogical imperative in comp studies to show how one’s research matters for what we do as teachers. Demonstrating how writers compose certainly has pedagogical value, but one might ask the simple question “why study Burke’s writing process?” But I am not that person. In fact, I think what little time these speakers did spend discussing the pedagogical implications of their papers wasn’t worth it, not because teaching doesn’t matter, but because it is not always apparent how our research will directly influence what we do as teachers, nor is it necessary to hunt for these implications (at least not at first). Archival research is tenuous enough, and sometimes you simply have to take what you’ve found and share it with others before the wider implications of these discoveries can be articulated. To conclude this review I want to spend a moment discussing the composition of this panel and its mechanics, for there is something to say about the success of this panel’s organization. All three papers worked well together to inform the session’s theme, and that can sometimes be a challenge in itself when putting together conference panels, but the arrangement of the speakers and their collective experience gave this panel its underlining value: George, an established Burke scholar, opening with a discussion that sets the scene for working with Burke’s archives; followed by Jenson, a smart and observant young researcher who is obviously set to contribute valued additions to Burke scholarship; and then Overall, who demonstrates that graduate students are the ones often engaged with the most innovative research, and who tested out his thoughts about Burke as a multimodal compositionist. I am not attempting to situate the value of each paper according to a kind of disciplinary hierarchy. What I am suggesting, however, is that conference panels might be that much more engaging when their participants bring with them different levels of experience. Not only do such panels model a kind of Burkean parlor, one in which anyone who has something of value to add to the conversation is welcome to participate, but they also demonstrate that the scholarly value of one’s work should not be evaluated by one’s disciplinary position. When it comes to the panel under consideration here, each paper could be critiqued on its own, but that would miss the point of the panel, which is to communicate that scholars are doing interesting things with Burke’s archive and that there is plenty of work to share for anyone who wants to join in. |