Kenneth Burke at the MoMA: A Viewer’s Theory

When Kenneth Burke visited the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War” in the summer of 1942, he most likely did not expect to leave with such intense and intensely contradictory impressions. His visit there offers rhetoric scholars an opportunity to examine the exhibition – important for museum rhetoric because of its propagandistic political message and its innovative visual and material design. Considering the exhibition on its own terms, and the way designers managed problems of circulation and implemented new methods of “extended vision” helps us to present Burke’s then-developing theories (placement, the pentad) as themselves decidedly visual – photographic, even – and concomitantly, for that moment at least, as decidedly war-directed

Performing thinking in action: the meletē of live coding

Within this article, live coding is conceived as a meletē, an Ancient Greek term used to describe a meditative thought experiment or exercise in thought, especially understood as a preparatory practice supporting other forms of critical — even ethical — action. Underpinned by the principle of performing its thinking through 'showing the screen', live coding involves 'making visible' the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice. Live coding can also be conceived as the performing of 'thinking-in-action', a live and embodied navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints, where its thinking-knowing cannot be easily transmitted nor is it strictly a latent knowledge or 'know how' activated through action. Live coding involves the live negotiation between receptivity and spontaneity, between the embodied and intuitive, between an immersive flow experience and split-attention, between human and machine, the known and not yet known. Moreover, in performing 'thinking-in-action', live coding emerges as an experimental site for reflecting on different perceptions and possibilities of temporal experience within live performance: for attending to the threshold between the live and mediated, between present and future-present, proposing even a quality of atemporality or aliveness

Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory

This paper offers a somatic genealogy of Kenneth Burke???s dramatism and its related cluster--symbolic action, attitude, identification--by tracing their development in relation to Sir Richard Paget???s theory of Gesture-Speech. Paget???s theory that humans speech derives from the use and development of bodily gestures held Burke???s interest for at least a decade while such crucial concepts were incubating. An examination of Paget???s theory in Burke???s early work offers a newly energized account of Burkean rhetorical theory. Such an account serves as a reminder that speech--and by Burke???s extension, rhetoric--is always a joint performance of body and mind.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe