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last.updated 10.4.05

 

Burke & Terministic Screens

Purpose

Kenneth Burke, a twentieth century American rhetorician, has proposed several theories that have described and influenced how we communicate. His theory of terministic screens helps us to understand how the arguments we and evidence that we use to support our arguments (i.e., the creation of knowledge) can depend upon how we interpret this evidence. Likewise, not everybody will understand the evidence in the same way. This discussion and activity will clarify and exemplify his theory.

Background

Life

  • 1897-1993; American (born in Pittsburgh)
  • rhetorician, literary critic, language philosopher, and poet
  • attended Ohio State briefly, studied philosophy at Cornell for a year and dropped out citing the horrors of "what college can do to a man of promise"
  • became self-made academic
  • wanted people to think critically about what words were doing to them, especially advocated words over war.

Scholarship

  • combined the creative with his critical works (note poem that we read)

  • rhetoric: "rooted in the an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols"

  • turns people and situations into analyzable texts
  • also known for pentad (i.e., act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) and the notion of the Parlor

Trivia

  • related to Harry Chapin
  • large bust of Kenneth Burke in the Joe Paterno wing of the Library at Penn. State.
  • calls himself Kenneth "Burps" after a few

Presentation

Lou, Florence, Deborah, Barry

Discussion

  • As a class we will establish the following terms:

    • terministic screens
    • scientistic approach
      • attitudinal function
      • hortatory function
    • dramatistic approach

  • How are terministic screens relevant to persuasive discourse?
  • What does Burke mean by: "Even in any terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must also function as a deflection of reality" (p. 45)
  • How would other rhetoricians we have studied responded to Burke? How do you see Burke directly or indirectly responding to them?

Activity

Read Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech below. Using Burke's rhetorical theory and Hamlet's speech, address the following questions:

  • Think about this passage in terms of the following terministic screens (i.e., philosophical, biological, literary, psychological, theological). How might a scholar from each of these disciplines interpret this speech?
  • Explain how this terministic screen works to reflect, select, and deflect reality in this situation.

"To Be, Or Not To Be"
from Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1)
by William Shakespeare

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.