Saturday, July 11, 2015

Reading On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph Gusfield

On Symbols and Society, an edited collection compiled by Joseph Gusfield, a sociologist, includes excerpts from several books by rhetorician Kenneth Burke. 

I am going to post my notes from that book on this blog. 


I will partition these notes into 22 different sections, and each section will be based on an excerpt from On Symbols and Society. The sections are in the same order as the chapters, though I cite Burke’s original works and not Gusfield’s book.

While I have read most of the works cited in this book before (several of them multiple times), I am using Gusfield's book instead of the original texts because that book is listed as required on the PhD preliminary exam in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota, which exam I plan to take in October. 

As I work on this, I start to see why Gusfield put things in the order he puts them in. He’s trying to help readers understand Burke the way he understands Burke. His method does make a certain kind of sense, based on dramatism, which is how many understand Burke. (Though I can't here help but wish that Burke's definition of and discussion of form in his "Lexicon Rhetoricae" in Counter-Statement had been included, especially since Burke himself believed that his definition of form was from where one should begin to understand him.)

Below, I have scanned in a document that helped me read the original sources Gusfield cites in On Symbols and Society. On page 2, you can see, below a few personal notes to myself, what the abbreviations and acronyms mean. 

In the notes I will post later, I cite the original texts and not Gusfield's book, and this is the piece of paper that helps me to do that.





Finally, please note that Burke often uses the word man to refer to people in general, a convention of the time period in which he lived. He also dropped out of college (and never graduated), but I personally don't believe he means to exclude anyone by using the term in the way he does, though by today's standards it may seem so.



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