Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life

In \"The Company We Keep\", Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of this particular encounter with this particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of 'good' work and 'bad'. Rather it will be a conversation about many kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us as we read? Who am I, during the hours of reading or listening? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: 'friendship with books', 'the exchange of gifts', 'the colonizing of worlds', 'the constitution of commonwealths'. He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.

The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction

This study explores the role of communication in the strategic self‐definition of whiteness. The transcripts from two focus group interviews (with Whites from two Historically Black Universities) are used to map the discourses of “White” participants concerning the nature of whiteness. The maps, when analyzed, uncovered significant commentary about White space and White privilege. Five strategies of representation emerged from the discursive territories. They identify whiteness as: (1) incompletion, (2) uninterrogateable space, (3) metaphor for the universal insider, (4) guilty and fair space, and (5) situationally immutable. The results imply that the space that Whites occupy is unclearly constructed and defined, and therefore is enigmatic.

White space, white privilege: Mapping discursive inquiry into the self

ion. For example, one of their categories is “Undesirable outcome” (1074), which seems to be at a level of abstraction above such categories as “Death of a loved one” and “Loss of a relationship” (1074; indeed, the second seems to be a case of the third which seems, in turn, to be a case of the first). But, insofar as they are concrete enough to count as prototypical, the categories they uncover are clearly in line with the preceding analysis. Thus, the eliciting conditions for sadness prominently include the two just mentioned, which are closely related to the prototype of happiness as romantic union. Other prototypes include “Discovering one is powerless” (1074), which is clearly related to the prototype of happiness as power. In relation to happiness itself, they isolate only three categories that are not overly abstract. These are “Receiving esteem, respect, praise,” “Being accepted, belonging,” and “Receiving love, liking, affection” (1075). The first is clearly connected with the prototype of happiness as power or authority. The third category is clearly related to the prototype of happiness as romantic union. The second category relates to both. Indeed, it relates to both in a way that bears on emplotment. Commonly, the conflicts that define the middle of a plot are resolved in such a way that the larger society comes together and there is an extension of acceptance and belonging in the end (e.g., through the reconciliation of parents and children in the romantic plot). In short, we seem to have some good prima facie evidence for positing two happiness prototypes. The point is not confined to modern America and Europe. Clearly, there were no broad scientific surveys or controlled experimental studies of emotion in premodern societies. However, there are highly regarded discussions and widely accepted ideas—such as the ancient Indic isolation of goals—that provide converging evidence. For example, Chikamatsu, widely thought of as one of the two greatest dramatists of Japan, wrote that, “The only happiness in this broad world” is “True love to true love” (234). The celebrated Malian Epic of Son-Jara states that “All people . . . seek to be men of power” (Sisòkò, I. 1277–78). Euripides’ Hecuba expresses both, lamenting the death of Astyanax: “if you had enjoyed youth and wedlock and the royal power that makes men gods, then you would have been happy” (200). These literary references lead to the second line of research. In order to consider cross-cultural prototypes in narrative, I set out to read a wide range of highly esteemed works of verbal art in unrelated literary traditions. I took up highly esteemed works as it seemed that they were most likely to express common narrative and emotional tendencies in a given culture or period. One crucial feature of a prototype-based account of

Theory and Interpretation of Narrative

Kenneth Burke's concept of rhetoric is complex and elusive, increasingly so as it becomes intertwined and infused with dialectic in the long third part of A Rhetoric of Motives and in some essays published shortly thereafter (1951; 1955; 1969b [1950], 183-333).1 The connection between Burkes rhetoric and dialectic is well established (Brummett 1995; Crusius 1986; 1999,120-21; Wess 1996, 136-216; Wolin 2001, 143-204), and his concept of rhetoric as identification is widely recognized for its broadening of the traditional view of rhetoric as persuasion to include identification as a means of induc ing cooperation and building communities (Crusius 1999,120-21; Hauser 1986,120-37; Henderson 1988, 33-34). Timothy W. Crusius establishes the fundamental relationship between A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives as dialectical and rhetorical counterparts and explains both the strengths and the limitations of identification as a means of inducing cooperation (1986). According to Crusius, dialectic explores the substance of a person or thing?all that "supports or 'substands'" it?from multiple and shifting perspectives, viewing human action dramatistically as act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose (24-28). Rhetoric complements dialectic and its multiple dramatistic perspectives by promoting "identification" and "cooperation," building "a community, a sense of oneness amid diversity of conflicting interests and values" (28-30). As Crusius and others observe,

Kenneth Burke on Dialectical-Rhetorical Transcendence

Previously unpublished writings by and about Kenneth Burke plus essays by such Burkean luminaries as Wayne C. Booth, William H. Rueckert, Robert Wess, Thomas Carmichael, and Michael Feehan make the publication of Unending Conversations a significant event in the field of Burke studies and in the wider field of literary criticism and theory. Editors Greig Henderson and David Cratis Williams have divided their material into three parts: "Dialectics of Expression, Communication, and Transcendence,""Criticism, Symbolicity, and Tropology," and "Transcendence and the Theological Motive." In the first part, Williams's textual introduction and Rueckert's essay analyze the genesis and composition of Burke's A Symbolic of Motives and Poetics, Dramatistically Considered. Henderson opens part two by showing how these two essays' concerns with literary form hearken back to Burke's first book of criticism, Counter-Statement. Thomas Carmichael discusses Burke's relationship to thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. Wess analyzes the relation between Burke's dramatistic pentad of act, agent, scene, agency, and purpose and his four master tropes - metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. In the third part, Booth mines his unpublished correspondence with Burke to demonstrate that Burke is a coy theologian. Michael Feehan discusses Burke's revelation in a 1983 interview that rather than rebounding from a naive kind of Marxism in Permanence and Change, he was rebounding from what he had "learned as a Christian Scientist."

Unending Conversations: New Writings by and About Kenneth Burke

Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory by Patrick O'Neill (review)

Kenneth Burke: Literature and Language as Symbolic Action

university of toronto quarterly, volume 75, number 1, winter 2006 May Sinclair’s engagement with the Brontës; and Ann B. Shteir on Phebe Lankester’s popular science writing. Despite the impressive body of research already completed on women, most of the contributors emphasize the amount of work that remains to be done, particularly in expanding our understanding of historical and social contexts. In the eighteenth century, for instance, Sally O’Driscoll illustrates the inadequacies of current historical scholarship on sexuality for a lesbian literary history, while Antonia Forster discusses the need for more accurate accounts of women novelists in the latter part of the century. This wide-ranging collection offers a variety of perspectives, with an excellent balance of theoretical and textual issues. As commentators continue to discuss the plethora of complex issues that the movement towards more comprehensive histories of women’s writing raises, that ongoing scholarly conversation will almost certainly validate the introductory editorial claim of Women and Literary History: ‘As groundwork, this collection will be hard to beat.’ (martine watson brownley)

Greig Henderson

Papers

Unending Conversations: New Writings by and About Kenneth Burke

Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory by Patrick O'Neill (review)

Kenneth Burke: Literature and Language as Symbolic Action

Kenneth Burke: Literature and Language as Symbolic Action

Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (review)