Our class blog contains the postings from students from previous semesters. I’ve decided to keep these posts active to highlight how the conversations we will be having in this class are on-going and that you are entering a conversation that is already in progress. In fact, we will be talking about writing as an on-going conversation all throughout this class. In his book The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, Kenneth Burke, a literary and rhetorical scholar, gave us the following metaphor of a “parlor” to highlight the conversational nature of knowledge making and, I would argue, writing:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument, then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him [or her]; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself [or herself] against you, to either the embarrassment of gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress (110-111, brackets mine).So, we'll be talking a lot about conversations...and, hopefully, we will add to this on-going conversation in new and interesting ways...ways that reflect who you are and what you have to say.
I'm looking forward to a great semester!
Best,
Kevin Mahoney
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