Richard Thames

Burke claims literature can be inductively analyzed by indexing key terms and their associations—i.e., a “cluster analysis.”  This critique claims motion pictures can likewise be analyzed by indexing key images, as illustrated by indexing the recurring imagery of “hands” and associated images and story elements in James Cameron's Titanic.

Stephen Morrison

This paper situates Lakoff’s metaphoric theory of political affiliation within Burke’s classification of poetic forms, and finds that Lakoff’s strict father and nurturant parent worldviews align with Burke’s tragic and comic forms. However, applying this to the 2016 Democratic debates complicates Lakoff’s view of political identity, and suggests that such identities are still better understood through the full range of Burkean identification, in which narrative and metaphor play important, but not singular, roles.

Matt Foy, Upper Iowa University

This essay examines the thirty-year career arc of professional wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts by employing a Burkean approach to understanding Roberts’s symbolically resonate performances of mortification. Through performances of mortification both during and following his active wrestling career, Roberts is transformed into a purifying agent for wrestling fans’ collective guilt over systemic “demons” of addiction and human frailty that have haunted professional wrestling and its fandom increasingly since the 1990s.

James Beasley

In 1970, Burke and McKeon held a debate at the University of Chicago, with the topic the difference between “Rhetoric” and Poetic.” This debate has never before been published, and Bob Wess and I present this debate with the following notes. We begin with our own interest in the debate, follow this with a brief outline of the debate, and then we make some observations about the significance of this debate for rhetorical scholarship today

Robert Wess

In 1970, Burke and McKeon held a debate at the University of Chicago, with the topic the difference between “Rhetoric” and Poetic.” This debate has never before been published, and James Beasley and I present this debate with the following notes. We begin with our own interest in the debate, follow this with a brief outline of the debate, and then we make some observations about the significance of this debate for rhetorical scholarship today.

Catholic Guilt, Mortification, and Transvaluation in the Case of the Milwaukee Fourteen

Christopher Oldenburg, Illinois College

Abstract

In 1968 the Milwaukee Fourteen, members of the Catholic Anti-Vietnam War Movement, removed approximately ten-thousand draft files from a Selective Service Office and burned them with home-made napalm in a nearby park before awaiting arrest. Employing the Burkean concepts of categorical guilt, mortification and transvaluation as a framework from which to analyze the Milwaukee Fourteen’s “statement” and the resistive act itself, this essay troubles the general understanding of mortification as simply extirpating one’s guilt by self-victimage. Rather the Milwaukee Fourteen mortify themselves for the disordered transgressions of a culture. Their sacrificial purification results in a form of hybrid victimage with the ultimate goal of transvaluing the moral order of the Vietnam War era.