Website launched

It's time I enter the 21st century! I tried Facebook and it wasn't really my thing, but I've had a great experience using the Wix.com interface in creating the site you now browse. It was exciting and time-consuming to go through all my old documents and materials, but I can detect a solid through-line.

My research and teaching go hand in hand. I am drawn into what might be called the "literary and philosophical education of Kenneth Burke" because he presents the rare example of an intellectual who based his learning trajectory outside the academy, if in its shadow. Arthur Schopenhauer is another example.

There are many ways to conceive of this education. Angus Fletcher calls it "the defensive art of the quarter-staff, Little John's weapon," evidently borrowing the trope from Burke himself. The more I study Burke's early education--novels, philosophy, and politics just to begin--the more impressed I am how deep it runs. Also, the more I have to correct my own prior assumptions.

In a rough, if not blind, trial and error over several years and institutions I have worked on the idea of this education as a curriculum. Fortunately, the academy embraced Kenneth Burke. Since the early 1980s, he has enjoyed a secure place in the university. But if he is to be a model rather than an icon, he needs to fit into a variety of appropriate molds, "individuations."

That's where the quarter-staff comes in. Burke himself was always on the inside of economic and trade practices; he made his living as a writer. He survived through text-awareness. His books, articles, and translations record the twentieth-century in an original and defensive manner.

I suspect everyone does this all the time. How does one train oneself and others in the verbal art of the quarter-staff? This is my quest. I have made some of my data from the last nine years available on this web-site.

On this inaugural blog post, I also include a group photograph from the 2015 weeklong seminar on Kenneth Burke's "War of Words," led by Jack Selzer, Kyle Jensen, and Krista Ratcliffe at the Rhetoric Society of America's biennial Summer Institute. Many important Burke scholars attended, and there is a lot of great Burke scholarship in the pipeline! Viva KB.