Draft KBS 2014 Program

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9th Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society

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Contents

Welcome Message……………………………………. x Acknowledgements…………………………………… x Keynote Speakers……………………………………... x Seminars……………………………………………….. x Officers of the Kenneth Burke Society……………..... x Awards of the Kenneth Burke Society………………... x Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society………………... x KB Discussion List……………………………………... x The Venue……………………………………………… x Thursday, July 17……………………………………… x Friday, July 18…………………………………………. x Saturday, July 19………………………………………. x Sunday, July 20………………………………………… x Index of Participants…………………………………... x

Welcome The summer heat in St Louis, MO, and the subsequent humming of the air conditioner, has us thinking of Kenneth Burke’s famous treatment of symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion, around which this conference gathers. After reminding us of his first two Dramatistic axioms—“There can be motion without action” and “There can be no action without motion”—Burke adds, with an implied “it’s more complicated than that,” that the “purely physiological behavior on the part of the audience can figure in a totally different kind of ‘communication’” (834). That is, while the realms of action and motion remain distinct, they do not remain incommunicado.

For instance, consider the operations of air conditioning equipment in a movie house. I have read that if a thriller is being played, this mechanism must work much harder than if the plot is of a milder sort because of the effects which the excitement of the audience has upon the conditions of the atmosphere in the theatre. Such bodily responses as increased warmth and accelerated respiration place a greater burden upon the air conditioning device, which is equipped with mechanical “sensors” that register the change in conditions and “behave” accordingly. (834)

Burke’s scare quotes here are, in no small way, the focus of work together over the next couple of days. As we retreat from the heat into air conditioned rooms to discuss our relations with each other and the many nonhumans with whom we share the world, the “behavior” of air conditioners will be front and center. In concluding his treatment of the air conditioner, Burke argues, “Its motions would proceed in the same way even if there were no drama or audience at all but there were some other such condition in the realm of motion that was “communicated” to it by its “sensors.”

Again, just what “communication” means here and elsewhere is the primary focus of this conference. While there are necessarily (and productively) panels outside the scope of the cfp, a solid majority of the panels take up the questions linger in these scare quotes. As we make our way through the most excellent offerings of the 9th Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society, let us maintain an attitude of openness toward the ways in which the nonsymbolic motion of both our own bodies and the motion of all the nonhumans bodies all around us communicate.

Importantly, and in a retrospective to Attitudes Toward History, Burke defines attitude as “the point of personal mediation between the realms of nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action” (394). For Burke, these realms are tightly knitted, and as Debra Hawhee reminds us, we should see them as “an irreducible pair, contiguous but distinct” (Moving Bodies 158). Stuff and story dance in attitudes. May this dance shape our work together under the hot and muggy motions of the Saint Louis sun.

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Acknowledgements Thanks to

--Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers KBS Conference Co-Chairs 2014

Department of English Saint Louis University

17 July 2014

Keynote Speakers FRIDAY LUNCH, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM Thomas Rickert Purdue University “Making Hope Out of Nothing at All: Amechania in Burke, Nietzsche, and Parmenides” Nietzsche once remarked that despite centuries of belief in the basic idea that God is truth, and truth is divine, it may be that the divine is nothing but error, blindness, and the lie (GS 344). The stakes of this statement are as profound and timely now as ever, and not simply for the humanities. A recent article argues that the fundamental belief in science’s ability to deliver truth and self-correct may not be justified—that science, and technology alongside, is always at the mercy of other forces.

The basic thematic here is that nothing humans do or produce offers escape from our foibles and errors—we are fundamentally amechania, without metis. I explore this thematic in Nietzsche and Burke, in particular on the tragic and comic attitudinal frames that they offer as hope. I then offer a third attitudinal perspective, that of the ancient Greek thinker Parmenides, who also had a profoundly pessimistic view on human capability to achieve truth and the good life, and cultivated this attitude through his philosophical poem on being. For Parmenides, hope was predicated on the utter acceptance of our entrapment in illusion and the cultivation of a profound attitude of metis emerging from this acceptance. Parmenidean thought is timely because science is fostering doubts within in its own ranks as to the hopes and technological solutions it can offer, in part because science cannot offer the “remedy” for our emotional, moral nature it was long believed to provide. Lastly, Parmenides offers a revelatory frame that seeks the nonhuman divine within the human, a point that bears exploration in contrast to Nietzsche’s cultivation of new values and Burke’s “complete sophistication” allowing for new vocabularies. Each of the attitudinal stances bears on the issue of media, for the question of what initiates a change in praxis is inseparable from the question of the means to do so.

We shall see that Parmenides demonstrates even more than Nietzsche and Burke an attendance to the performative dimension—predicated not on the hope to overcome human nature but rather on absolute acceptance of our utter helplessness, our amechania, that is, our lack of metis without appeal to revelatory aid.

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SATURDAY BANQUET, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM Jodie Nicotra University of Idaho “’Compulsion and “Transcendence Sideways’: Burke’s Technological Attitudes” Burke makes no bones about his fear and loathing of the symbol-using, symbol-used animal’s “technological psychosis.” Unless remediated by symbolic action in the form of the comic frame and perspective by incongruity (something to which he arguably devoted his entire lengthy career), Burke believed, the pervasiveness of the technological attitude would, by the logic of entelechy, bring a bad end: in the form of an Earth made unlivable by contamination from technological processes or in nuclear destruction.

While Burke argued that all things related to humans could be categorized as either symbolic action or nonsymbolic motion, it’s clear that technology presented an unusual and troublesome case, belonging comfortably to neither realm. As he wrote in one of his attempts to apply a comic corrective to the potential harms of the technological attitude, “the compulsiveness of man’s technologic genius, as compulsively implemented by the vast compulsions of our vast technologic grid, makes for a self-perpetuating cycle quite beyond our ability to adopt any major reforms in our way of doing things”(“Helhaven” 19). Here it’s clear that Burke sees technology as having its own sort of agency, one that might rival symbolic action; he would certainly have appreciated Donna Haraway’s observation that “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (Simians, Cyborgs, Women 152). This language of compulsion (which crops up frequently in reference to technology in his works) also aptly characterizes Burke’s own attitudes toward technology. In a different essay, he confesses that for years he had been “compulsively taking notes on the subject of technological pollution,” even as he loathed the notes and wanted to “get shut of the whole issue…But it goes on nagging me” (“Why Satire,” 312).

Yet at points within Burke’s corpus appear signs of a different attitude toward technology, one characterized by an appreciation for the strange not-quite-agency of machines themselves that he himself wryly names “transcendence sideways” (ATH 381). Here, along with Burke’s published theoretical work, I read his poetry, fiction, and archival materials to flesh out this somewhat hidden attitude toward technology. Ultimately, I argue, the notion of “transcendence sideways” is an attitude appropriate for an era where the machines have become livelier than ever.

Seminars Kenneth Burke and New Materialisms Steven B. Katz, Clemson University It is well known in Burke circles that KB was vitally concerned with questions of “substance”—material vs. rhetorical, motion vs. motive, causality vs. free will—and the effects of scientism and determinism on our understanding of the human animal as a symbol using being. What Diana Coole and Samantha Frost in their anthology have labeled “New Materialisms” are emerging in the twenty-first century—but across the entire curricula, from computer engineering and life sciences, through social and political sciences, to posthuman philosophies and rhetorics. What all these movements may have in common might be simplified and called an ‘animated empiricism’ in which objects and artifacts, long neglected in “the situation,” are increasingly recognized as having their own, powerful agency (what Levi Bryant dubbed A Democracy of Objects).

Can Burke’s discussion and analysis of “substance”— as dramatistically rather than mechanically motivated, as casuistic rather than universal categories, as the result of rhetorical deliberation and persuasion rather than mere fact and sheer force—help us grapple with and understand new materialisms? For instance, what might Burkean rhetoric reveal about the similarities, distinctions, and relations between objects as ‘actants’, and the symbolic of the human body? Between classical literacy and what Ulmer in Avatar Emergencies calls “flash reason”? Between “speculative realism” (Harman) and pentadic screens? How might Burke deal with the philosophies and sciences of

Jodie Nicotra University of Idaho Draf

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5 new materialisms, e.g., informatics, cybernetics, actor-network theories, object oriented ontologies, digital and virtual realities, and other metaphysical empiricisms, as well as some of the physical products of new materialisms, e.g., radical (prosthetic/technological) enhancement, genetic modification, synthetic biology, nanotechnologies, and biosocial engineering (as eagerly anticipated by George Church and Ed Regis in Regenesis)?

All of these questions have profound implications not only for philosophies and rhetorics of agency, but also for political and environmental sciences, as Vibrant Matter (Bennett) and Ecology without Nature (Morton) demonstrate; for gender, queer, and race studies; and for the rhetoric and ethics of our relations to each other, to our machines, to our avatars, and to “the Other.” In light of the new materialisms, what are our definitions of symbolic action, “community,” the “individual,” human consciousness itself? In this seminar, we will ecstatically together explore some of the questions and issues raised above by consulting and applying selected Burke scholarship (TBA) to a sampling of readings representing some of these new materialisms (to be distributed to seminar participants prior to the conference). The Problem of Substance in Kenneth Burke’s Corpus Bryan Crable, Villanova University Clarke Rountree, University of Alabama in Huntsville Richard Thames, Duquesne University David Cratis Williams, Florida Atlantic University Substance has been a central term in Burke’s theory of human symbol-using at least since A Grammar of Motives, where its paradoxical nature is connected to the problem of motives. This emphasis on substance continues in A Rhetoric of Motives, where consubstantiality is the aim of identification, making separate entities substantially “one.” And, less well known, Burke promised to consider substance and identity in A Symbolic of Motives (a version of which was published recently, so that commentary on it has scarcely begun).

Marie Hochmuth Nichols called Burke’s analysis of substance and its connection to identification “his most basic contribution to the philosophy of rhetoric” (Marie Hochmuth, “Kenneth Burke and the ‘New Rhetoric,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38.2 [1952]: 137). Weldon B. Durham, who published an essay in The Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1980 on Burke’s idea of substance, notes that “Burke appropriated a term in philosophical disrepute and spun out of it half a life’s work” (Weldon B. Durham, “Kenneth Burke's Concept of Substance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66.4 [1980]: 354).

Although most Burkeans have a working knowledge of Burke’s paradox of substance and of consubstantiality, there is much more to be scrutinized in this important concept.

This seminar seeks to explore Burke’s conception of substance and its place in his theory of human symbol using. It will revisit some of the thinkers in Burke’s day whom he charged with banishing the word substance from philosophy, and try to better understand his assertion that “in banishing the term, far from banishing its functions one merely conceals them” (Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives 21.) Generally, then, the seminar will address the following questions:

• Which thinkers banished the term substance, particularly in Burke’s day, and why? • Why do the functions of terms for substance persist, even if the terms for it are not used? • Without terms for substance, how have theorists “worked around” the problem of substance? • How does Burke define substance? • What role does substance play in Burke’s theories? • Is substance a central, if unacknowledged term, in contemporary theories of symbol-using?

Readings will include excerpts from theoretical texts that use, eschew, or dismiss the term substance; Durham’s and others’ essays on Burke and substance, and Burkean texts that examine the concept.

Given the complexity of the issues surrounding this central and disputed concept, the seminar will feature four co-leaders to ensure a variety of perspectives and a depth of insights into these issues.

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Kenneth Burke and the Digital Archive Ethan Sproat, Utah Valley University Kenneth Burke developed his entire symbol-use project throughout the 20th century when our theories of communication were out-paced only by our means of communication. However, even though KB was one of the most influential theorists of human communication in a time of so many advances in communication technology, there is an apparent dearth of audio or video footage of KB. Yet such a dearth is only “apparent” because there actually are many existing audio and visual recordings of KB lecturing, performing readings, or participating in discussions or interviews. Most KB scholars have not seen or heard much of this footage for two basic reasons: first, the existing footage is not centrally accessible or cataloged in any one place; second, such footage is often in a medium that prohibits broad distribution (as with various analog recording technologies).

Accordingly, this seminar seeks to establish a Kenneth Burke Digital Archive Initiative with the following goals: • Coordinate efforts among KB enthusiasts to identify the current repositories of all existing audio and video

recordings of KB. • Assemble historical notes and details surrounding each recording. • Catalog all these in one resource through the KB Journal. • Work with individual repositories to digitally transfer all existing KB footage that is not already digitized.

The first day of this seminar will provide an overview of some notable KB footage that has undergone partial or

complete digital transfer. These include three projects that have received attention at previous KB conferences and one new project that is particularly apropos to this year’s KB Conference in St. Louis. This new project involves audio recordings of KB performing a reading and participating in an extended discussion (moderated by poet Howard Nemerov) while KB was the Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University in St. Louis during the 1970-71 school year.

The second day of this seminar will address the array of logistical challenges facing a Kenneth Burke Digital Archive Initiative and some strategies for addressing them. Also during this session, seminar participants will begin actively participating in the Kenneth Burke Digital Archive Initiative. We will meet in a computer lab, and seminar participants will begin a coordinated effort to find additional repositories of audio or video footage of KB. Working from a list of universities and schools KB visited, seminar participants will scour special collections databases and online library resources for hints of currently-not-in-print KB materials (text, audio, video, etc.) that are either not yet digitized or not yet on the Kenneth Burke Society radar—i.e. materials that might be candidates for digital archive work.

On the final day of this seminar, participants will collect their findings and make plans for further online participation in the Kenneth Burke Digital Archive Initiative. Identification Redux David Blakesley, Clemson University In naming identification an aim of rhetoric, Burke may or may not intend to valorize identification for its own sake:

identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If [people] were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If [people] were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of [humanity’s] very essence. (RM 22).

We are divided, and so we desire consubstantiality. We are identified, and so we desire division. In acts of identification or division, we imagine ourselves to be alike or different. And thus identification in the imaginary is a rhetorical process as well as the act of decoding and encoding signs. Burke saw identification—and with it, the corresponding situation of division—as both the condition and aim of rhetoric. The desire for identification, which Burke calls consubstantiality, is premised on its absence, on the condition of our division from one another. There would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim our unity, Burke says, if we were already identical.

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7 Consubstantiality, with its roots in the ambiguous substance (sub-stance), may be purely an expression of desire, an identity of attitude and act in a symbolic, visual, and (even) emotional realm, an assertion of or desire for identities and divisions in a limitless realm of ambiguity.

This seminar will focus on the familiar and often competing concepts of identification and division in recent scholarship, as well as their implications for rhetorical theory, critical inquiry, and Burke’s own (non)system.

1. What motives might we (or does Burke) associate with identification and division? 2. To what extent does Burke idealize or privilege identification in his understanding of rhetoric? 3. How might Burke’s conceptions of identification and division help us understand motives grounded in racial

or gendered ethics? 4. Recent extensions and critiques (some of which seminar participants will read in advance) have argued that

Burke valorizes identification and in so doing has minimized or ignored other motives for rhetoric. What critiques have most effectively challenged Burke’s concepts of identification or division?

5. What material bases for identification or division does Burke imagine? 6. From the identity politics of Facebook and social media to the virtual and augmented realities of Google

Glass, in what ways do emergent technologies and interfaces extend or limit identifications or expose or increase division?

7. What is the visual basis of identification and division (e.g., in film, media, design, image) Seminar participants will be asked to submit a short position statement (250-500 words) addressing one of these questions, or one they want to bring to the attention of others. A short list of reading suggestions will be distributed by mid-June or earlier.

Officers of the Kenneth Burke Society President: Clarke Rountree, University of Alabama, Huntsville Immediate Past-President: Ann George, Texas Christian University Vice President: David Cratis Williams, Florida Atlantic University Treasurer: Virginia Anderson, Indiana University Southeast Secretary: Elvera Berry, Roberts Wesleyan College Editor of Publications: David Blakesley, Clemson University

Awards of the Kenneth Burke Society The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes extraordinary achievement in Burke studies over a number of years. Previous recipients are Leland Griffin (1990); William Rueckert (1993); Bernard Brock (1993); James Chesebro (1999); Tim Crusius (2002); Jack Selzer (2005); Wayne Booth, Michael Burke, Julie Whitaker (2008). Bryan Crable (2011). The Distinguished Service Award recognizes extraordinary service to the Society. Previous recipients are Sharon Dailey (1990), James Chesebro (1993), Dale Bertelson (1996), Robert Wess (1999), Clarke Rountree (2002), David Blakesley (2005), Mark Huglen (2008), Ann George (2011). The Emerging Scholar Award recognizes the extraordinary promise of the work of a young scholar. Recipients in the past have included both senior graduate students and new assistant professors. Previous recipients are Dale Bertelson (1993), Mark Wright (1996), Mark Meister and Glenn Stillar (1999), Debra Hawhee (2002), Ryan Weber and Nathaniel Rivers (2005), Elizabeth Weiser (2008), Kyle Jensen (2011).

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Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society Founded in 2004, KB Journal takes as its mission the exploration of what it means to be “Burkean.” To this end, KB Journal publishes original scholarship that addresses, applies, extends, repurposes, or challenges the writings of Kenneth Burke, which include but are not limited to the major books and hundreds of articles by Burke, as well as the growing corpus of research material about Burke. It provides an outlet for integrating and critiquing the gamut of Burkean studies in communication, composition, English, gender, literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and technical writing. In light of this, Kenneth Burke need not be the sole focus of a submission, but Burke should be integral to the structure of the argument. Editors Current: David Blakesley 2011-2013: Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers 2008-2011: Andrew King 2004-2008: Clarke Rountree and Mark Huglen Web Developers 2008-2011: Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber 2004-2008: David Blakesley

KB Discussion List The KB Discussion List (originally Burke-L) was launched in January, 1998. You can join here: https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb. The founder and moderator is David Blakesley

The Venue Saint Louis University is located in St. Louis, MO. The Busch Student Center (http://www.slu.edu/bsc.xml) is located in bustling Midtown St. Louis (http://www.grandcenter.org). On-campus lodging is available at the recently built Hotel Ignacio (http://www.hotelignaciostl.com) and in the recently renovated Marchetti Tower West (http://www.slu.edu/housing-and-residence-life/housing-options/marchetti-towers). Draf

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Thursday, July 17 3:00 – 7:00 pm Busch Student Center (BSC) Registration Table Open 4:30 – 6:00 pm SEMINAR MEETINGS BSC Room # Burke and the Image BSC Room # Burke and the Problem of Substance BSC Room # Burke and New Materialisms BSC Room # Identification Redux 7:00 – 9:00 pm WELCOME RECEPTION Busch Student Center

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Friday, July 18 Busch Student Center (BSC) Registration Table open from 8:00 am – 5:00 pm A: CONCURRENT SESSIONS (8:30 – 9:45 AM) A.1 BSC Room # FEATURED SESSION: BURKEIAN PERSPECTIVES ON ART AND CULTURE: LIFE IN A DITIGAL (AUGMENTED) WORLD David Blakesley (Clemson University), Chair Katherine Hanzalik (Clemson University), “Studio-Art-Movements: Trans-formation, (Dis)Connection, and

Social Engagement” John Jay Jacobs (Clemson University), “Physical and Virtual Bodies and Spaces” Daphne-Tatiana Canlas (Clemson University), “Everyday Visual Technologies: Motives and the (Ephemeral)

Spaces of the Quotidian” A.2 BSC Room # KENNETH BURKE IN THE PARLOR Zac Wendler (Northern Illinois University), “A Difference of Philosophy: Reconciling Burke & Bitzer” Satish Gupta (Rajiv Gandhi University), “Point Counter-point in Kenneth Burke and Charu Sheel Singh's

Literary Theory” Cynthia L. Jeney (Missouri Western State University), “Kenneth Burke, John Searle, and Chris Hables Gray

Walk Into a Cyber Bar: Why the Burkean System Must Be Extended Online” John Dowd (Northern Illinois University), “The Symbolic and Material Realms of Technology: Understanding

Mediation Through Burke and McLuhan” A.3 BSC Room # OF INTERFACES AND OPERATING SYSTEMS (ALSO DROIDS) Anneli Bowie, “Skeuomorphism vs. Flat Design: Exploring the Technological Orientations Expressed in

Interface Aesthetics” Damien Smith Pfister, “These Are Probably the Droids Kenneth Burke Was Looking For” Ryan D. Shirey, “Her, Hermeneutics, and Terministic 404 Screens” A.4 BSC Room # PARLIAMENTS OF PERSUASIVE TOOLS Robert Wyckoff (Housatonic Community College), “Technology's Attitudes Toward Humanity” Jared Colton (Clemson University), ““How Pure Persuasion Informs Our Attitudes Toward Bureaucratic

Technologies” Bryan G. Salmons (Lincoln University), “A Parliamentary Jangle: Kenneth Burke and Questions of Value in

Technology” Melvin Hall (University of Wisconsin–Madison), “Tools Critiquing Tools: Godfrey Reggio Celebrates the

Word (god-term), Documents Technology's (Agency's) Expanding Circumference, and Reveals Technology as Poetry for Living in his Qatsi Trilogy”

A.5 BSC Room # LANGUAGE & LITERATURE Christopher Oldenburg (Illinois College), “Attitudes Towards Wallace Stevens: Kenneth Burke, Hierarchy, and

the Symmetry of Incongruity in The Emperor of Ice Cream” Annie Laurie Nichols (University of Maryland, College Park), “The Mediation of Moral Action” Raymond Blanton, “The Wanderer: On the Road with Kenneth Burke”

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9:45-10:15 am Break

B: CONCURRENT SESSIONS (10:15 – 11:30 AM) B.1 BSC Room # FEATURED SESSION: “BODIES THAT LEARN LANGUAGE”: RHETORIC, ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION

Steven Mailloux (Loyola Marymount University), “Jesuit Theorhetoric as Equipment for Living” Richard van Oort (University of Victoria), “Kenneth Burke’s Shakespearean Anthropology” Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert (Ghent University), “Rhetoric & Anthropology as Equipment for Education” Respondent: Herbert W. Simons (Temple University)

B.2 BSC Room # BURKE AND HIS CHICAGO CIRCLE

Gregory Clark (Brigham Young University), “Burke, McKeon, and Booth, and the Problem of a Rhetorical Poetics”

Jack Selzer (Penn State University), “Kenneth Burke's 1949-50 Chicago Stay” Robert Wess (Oregon State University), “The Aristotle in the Burke/McKeon Correspondence”

B.3 BSC Room # BURKE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Brian Henderson, “Technological Psychosis and the Problem of Nature: What Burke Still Has to Teach Us” Christine M. Skolnik (DePaul University), “Logology, Hyperobjects, and Mirrors” Jessica Sheffield (The University of South Alabama), “Drama in the Delta: A Burkean Anion alysis of the

Mobile-Tensaw River Delta National Park Controversy” B.4 BSC Room # ONLINE BODIES

Elizabeth Lowry (Arizona State University) “Symbolic Action, Symbolic Efficiency, and the Practice of Blogging”

Mari Ramler (Clemson University), “Body-less Voices in the Burkeian Parlor” Sarah Turner McGowen (University of Missouri), “‘Like’ if You Agree: Political Convergence in a Social Media

Environment” B.5 BSC Room # BURKEAN HABITS/HABITUS

AmyLea Clemons (Francis Marion University), “Rhetoric, Technology, and Identification: The ‘Spoon Theory’ as Disabled Habitus”

José M. Cortez (University of Arizona), “Rotting with Perfection: Technological Psychosis as a Rhetoric of Bioinformatics in Genetic Patent Discourse”

Jim Creel (Texas Christian University), “The Body as Scene: Substance, Identification and Abjection” Waldemar Petermann (Lund University), “Circumference, Attitude and the Analysis of Habitual Action!”

11:30 - 1:00 pm Busch Student Center (BSC)

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LUNCH: KEYNOTE SPEAKER Thomas Rickert, Purdue University “Making Hope Out of Nothing at All: Amechania in Burke, Nietzsche, and Parmenides” Thomas Rickert is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Purdue University. His areas of interest include the usual suspects: histories and theories of rhetoric, critical theory, composition, cultural studies, music, and digital culture. His first book, Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject (U of Pittsburgh P), was published in 2007. His second book, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (U of Pittsburgh P), was published in June 2013. This book was awarded the 2014 CCCC Prize. He has begun a third book project that lacks both title and capsule description, but seems to involve the prehistory of rhetoric and a starring role for caves. There may be music. 1:00 – 2:30 pm SEMINAR MEETINGS BSC Room # Burke and the Image BSC Room # Burke and the Problem of Substance BSC Room # Burke and New Materialisms BSC Room # Identification Redux

2:30 - 3:00 pm Break C: CONCURRENT SESSIONS (3:00 – 4:15 PM) C.1 BSC Room # FEATURED ROUNDTABLE: ROBO DIALECTICUS: ALGORITHMIC ACTIONS AND MOTIONS

Jim Brown (University of Wisconsin, Madison) Collin Brooke (Syracuse University) Annette Vee (University of Pittsburgh) Christian Lindgren (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities)

C.2 BSC Room # OF MOTIVES AND MACHINES

Virginia Anderson (Indiana University Southeast), “The God in the Machine: Language as the Ultimate Tool Joseph Bartolotta (University of New Mexico), “Humans Act and Machines Move: Burke’s Critical Approach

to Technologies” Dale Keller (Taylor University), “A Rhetorician Ponders Technology: Burke and Contemporary Selections,

Reflections, and Deflections”

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C.3 BSC Room # BURKEAN CONCERNS IN (RHETORICAL) THEORY

Miriam Marty Clark (Auburn University), “The Memex, the Pentad, and Poetry in the Information Age” Megan Sinner (Saint Louis University), “Attitudes Toward Morality: The Rhetoric of ‘The Rhetoric of Hitler’s

“Battle”’” Hunter Stephenson (University of Houston-Clear Lake), “’Strategic Spots’ and Kairos: (One of) Burke’s Debts

to Classical Rhetoric” Brian Gogan (Western Michigan University), “From Burke to Baudrillard: Modern Attitudes Towards

Consubstantiality” C.4 BSC Room # POLITICS AND/OF RACE

Scott Gage (Colorado State University-Pueblo), “Attitudes of Intimacy: Lynching Postcards and the Perpetuation of White Supremacist Identifications”

Jean Costanza Miller (The George Washington University), “Rhetoric as Equipment for Healing: A Burkean Approach to Confronting Racism in Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound”

Timothy Ballingall (Texas Christian University), “Piety, Impiety, and Social Awkwardness” C.5 BSC Room # DRAMATISM ONLINE

Ali Reza Eshraghi (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Practicing Grotesque in Facebook” Matt Pitchford (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), “Democracy from the Machine: Reddit,

Identification, and Technology” Emily Jo Schwaller (Michigan State University), “A Dramatistic Reading of Pinterest”

4:15 - 4:30 pm Break FEARURED SESSIONS (4:30 – 5:30 PM) Busch Student Center (BSC) PUBLISHING IN/ON KENNETH BURKE David Blakesley, Clemson University Bryan Crable, Villanova University Paul Lynch, Saint Louis University Jodie Nicotra, University of Idaho Nathaniel Rivers, Saint Louis University Elizabeth Weiser, Ohio State University A Roundtable Q&A discussing the prospects and challenges of publishing scholarship that employs, deploys, critiques or challenges the work of Kenneth Burke 6:00 - 9:00 pm Busch Student Center (BSC) BARBEQUE AND OPEN-MIC NIGHT

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Saturday, July 19 Busch Student Center (BSC)

D: CONCURRENT SESSIONS (8:30 – 9:45 AM) D.1 BSC Room # FEATURED SESSION: BURKE AND RHETORICAL WORLDING IN THE PARLIAMENT OF THINGS

Kundai Chirindo (Lewis and Clark College) and Jaclyn Howell (University of Kansas), “Of Rhetorical Science/Scientific Rhetoric: Burke and Latour on the Parliament of Things”

Rob Topinka (Northwestern University), “Desirous Rhetorics: Latour and Burke in London’s Sewers” Jason Barrett-Fox (Arkansas State University), “Attuning (Dis)Connection: Burkean Ontology, Ambient

Rhetoric, and an Historiography of the Kairic Possible” D.2 BSC Room # DEVELOPING KENNETH BURKE

David Cratis Williams (Florida Atlantic University), “Buckeye Burke: Kenneth Burke’s Term at The Ohio State University”

David Erland Isaksen (Texas Christian University), “The Aesthetic of Technological Consummation”: Burke, Oppenheimer, and the Nuclear Bomb”

Courtney Wright (Bowling Green State University), “The Entelechy of Formlessness and the Civic Technologies of KB’s Formative Years”

D.3 BSC Room # MULTIMODAL EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING

Joshua Hill (Duquesne University), “Of Eloquence in Advertising: Theorizing Advertising Through Kenneth Burke’s Rhetorical Aesthetics”

Ira Allen (Indiana University), “The Multimodal Attitude Toward History: Reflections on Translating Benjamin’s Radio-Plays”

Deborah Leiter Nyabuti (Southern Illinois University-Carbondale), “‘Whodunnit?,’ Reality TV, and Life as Equipment for Literature”

D.4 BSC Room # BURKE AND POLITICS

Ann George (Texas Christian University), “The Ins and Outs of Communism” M. Karen Walker (University of Maryland College Park), “Burke’s Value to Diplomatic Tradecraft:

Transforming a Bilateral Relationship through Courtship and Consubstantiation.” Kathy Elrick (Clemson University), “Mansplaining: Kenneth Burke’s Discussion on Motives, Frames and

Ideology” Edward C. Appel (Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania), “Melodrama and Tragedy as Dramatic Action: The

Case of Tom DeLay” D.5 BSC Room # CONSTRUCTIONS OF AUTHORITY: LEGAL, RELIGIOUS, SCIENTIFIC, AND TECHNOLOGICAL

Clarke Rountree (University of Alabama in Huntsville), “Defending Gun Ownership: The United States Supreme Court’s Construction of Judicial Authority in District of Columbia v. Heller”

Jouni Tilli (University of Jyväskylä, Finland), “Prophets, Priests, and Sinners: Construction of Authority in Finnish Lutheran Clerical Rhetoric during WWII”

John Rountree (Georgia State University), “NASA’s Constructions of Authority in Allaying 2012 Doomsday Fears”

David Payne (University of South Florida), “Technology, Transhumanism, and Transformation of Motive: A Look at Agency and Purpose in the Rhetoric of the Future”

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9:45-10:15 am Break E: CONCURRENT SESSIONS (10:15 – 11:45 AM) E.1 BSC Room # FEATURED SESSION: TO THE END(S) OF TECHNOLOGY

Elizabeth Weiser (The Ohio State University), “Technological Devolution: Attitudes Toward Industry” Jimmy Butts (Wake Forrest University), “Writing Toward The Apocalypse With Burke” James P. Zappen (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), “Kenneth Burke’s Conversation with Technology”

E.2 BSC Room # AESTHETICS AND IDEOLOGY: BURKE, BAKHTIN, MARX, AND LENIN

Greig Henderson (University of Toronto), “The Ideology of the Aesthetic: Burke, Bahktin, and the Question of Style”

Thomas Carmichael (University of Western Ontario),”Constitution, Ultimate Order, and the Locomotive of the Revolution: Burke, Marx, and Lenin”

Jonathan Butler (Soochow University),”Solipsism as Style (or, What is the Sound of One Man Ranting?): The Aesthetics of Communicative Failure in Kenneth Burke’s Towards a Better Life”

E.3 BSC Room # PICTURING THE CHANGE: BURKE AND IMAGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Joel Overall (Belmont University), “Reanimating Burke” Tom Jesse (Texas Christian University), “Digital Poetics + You = Pure Persuasion” Sharon A. Harris (Southern Methodist University), “Thought Bubbles, Static Images, and Piety: The Rhetoric

of 350.org” E.4 BSC Room # ARTFUL BODIES

Pearce Durst (University of Montevallo), “‘Ideas of Ideas’ in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive: Kenneth Burke as Cinematographer”

Paul Berry (Yale School of Music), “Burke and the Technologies of Musical Performance” Ellen Klein and David Payne (The University of South Florida), “The Technological Psychosis, Cultural Lag,

and the American way of Death: the Search for a Poetic Corrective” E.5 BSC Room # BURKE AND RELIGION

Matthew Miller (Saint Louis University), “Attitudes toward Religion: (Theological) Gnosis/(Liturgical) Incarnation”

Gavin F. Hurley (University of Rhode Island), “Contemporary Spirituality as Technology: Burkean Mysticism and Matthew Fox’s The Coming of the Cosmic Christ”

Jarron Slater (University of Minnesota), “Seeing Through a Lens of Feeling: A Patho-Logology of Love” Robert Tousley (Independent Scholar), “Conflicted Humor: The Rhetorical Negative and Necessitarian

Principle in Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God” 11:45-1:00 pm Break

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1:00 – 2:30 pm SEMINAR MEETINGS BSC Room # Burke and the Image BSC Room # Burke and the Problem of Substance BSC Room # Burke and New Materialisms BSC Room # Identification Redux 2:30 - 3:00 pm Break F: CONCURRENT SESSIONS (3:00 – 4:15 PM) F.1 BSC Room # FEATURED SESSION: CHASING TECHNOLOGY: BURKEAN PERSPECTIVES ON A CHANGED WORLD

Elvera Berry (Roberts Wesleyan College), “’Let Us Try Again!’ Ethos as Method in the Face of Technological Change”

Bryan Crable (Villanova University), “Burke, Bodies, and Technology: Transformations in our Attitudinal Dancing”

Erik Garrett (Duquesne University), “Burke and (Anti)Urban Technologies: Re-Imaging the City” James Klumpp (University of Maryland), “The Post-Mass Media Age: How do the New Technologies of

Communication Alter Rhetorical Study of Motivation?” F.2 BSC Room # TECNHOLOGY IN THE ACADEMY

Stan A. Lindsay (Florida State University), “Using Technology in Online Learning Systems: An Agency-Act Ratio”

Marcy Leasum Orwig (UW-Eau Claire), “Attitudes Toward Teaching Social Media in the Classroom: How Burke Might Respond and Adapt to New Challenges”

Matthew Osborn (Clemson University), “Transformation of Apparatus in the Humanities as Reorientation” F.3 BSC Room # HE HAS ALWAYS BEEN MORE THAN MODERN: BURKEAN RHETORIC AS POSTHUMANIST INQUIRY

Kellie Sharp-Hoskins (New Mexico State University) Chris Mays (Illinois State University) Julie Jung (Illinois State University)

F.4 BSC Room # TECHNOLOGIES OF CHANGE

James Klumpp (University of Maryland), “Rhetoric and Social Order: Burkean Revisions in the Problem of Social Change”

Gretchen Underwood (Pittsburgh University), “Policy vocabularies: Man versus Machine” Camille Kaminski Lewis (Independent Scholar), “He said, They said: Dueling Bob Jones University in the

Public Sphere”

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4:15 - 5:00 pm Break 5:00 - 6:00 pm Busch Student Center (BSC) CASH BAR 11:30 - 1:00 pm Busch Student Center (BSC) BANQUET, KEYNOTE ADDRESS, AND AWARDS Jodie Nicotra, University of Idaho “’Compulsion and ‘Transcendence Sideways’: Burke’s Technological Attitudes” A native of Pittsburgh, Jodie received a Ph.D., in the field of rhetoric and composition in 2005. She has published articles on various aspects of rhetoric and writing, and is currently working on two books: a rhetorical genealogy of the concept of habit, and a new book (with Rochelle Smith from the UI Library) about the current renaissance of the “do-it-yourself” ethos. Jodie typically teaches undergraduate writing courses and graduate courses in composition theory and various aspects of rhetoric; she has also taught in the Honors and Core Discovery Programs.

Jodie Nicotra University of Idaho Draf

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Sunday, July 20 8:30 – 9:30 am SEMINAR MEETINGS BSC Room # Burke and the Image BSC Room # Burke and the Problem of Substance BSC Room # Burke and New Materialisms BSC Room # Identification Redux 9:30 - 9:45 am Break 9:45 - 10:45 am BSC Room # KENNETH BURKE SOCIETY GENERAL MEETING 11:00 - Noon BSC Room # KENNETH BURKE SOCIETY OFFICERS MEETING

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Index of Participants

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#KBS14

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Draft KBS 2014 Program

Documents

Transcript of Draft KBS 2014 Program