#dramatistic pentad

[joachimvlieghe]

Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Culture in Social Reading Platforms

My first full length journal article is out since September 12th and I am glad to say I got it published in an open-access journal!

Download it for free at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss3/7/

Reference:

Vlieghe, J. & Rutten, K. (2013) Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Culture in Social Reading Platforms. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 15 (3): <http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2244>

Abstract:

In their article "Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Culture in Social Reading Platforms" Joachim Vlieghe and Kris Rutten present a case study of the discourse surrounding literary phenomena that are emerging within social media. The case study is part of a methodological exploration within literacy studies whereby the social media's transformative effects on literary literacies are studied by focusing on language as symbolic and situated action. Vlieghe and Rutten have identified unique social reading platforms based on a prolonged study of the social media environment. The analysis of the developers' discourse on social reading platforms shows how developers are formulating new instructions on how to talk and to act in relation to literature by changing the scope of concepts related to literary phenomena within the "social media" system.

[joachimvlieghe]

Since no two things or acts or situations are exactly alike, you cannot apply the same term to both of them without thereby introducing a certain margin of ambiguity, an ambiguity as great as the difference between the two subjects that are given the identical title. And all the more may you expect to find ambiguity in terms so "titular" as to become the marks of a philosophic school, or even several philosophic schools. Hence, instead of considering it our task to "dispose of" any ambiguity by merely disclosing the fact that it is an ambiguity, we rather consider it our task to study and clarify the resources of ambiguity. For in the course of this work, we shall deal with many kinds of transformation-and it is in the areas of ambiguity that transformations take place; in fact, without such areas, transformation would be impossible.

Kenneth Burke (1969) Introduction: The Five Key Terms of Dramatism, in: The Grammar of Motives (p.xix)

... on ambiguity

[joachimvlieghe]

Summary

A Grammar of Motives - Kenneth Burke

Central question: "What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives." (Grammar of Motives, p.xv)

Central issue: "(...) increase our awareness (my own and others’) of the ways in which motives move us and deceive us, if we are not to goad one another endlessly to the cult of powers that can bring no genuine humaneness to the world."(The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley: 1915-1981, p.27)

For an extensive summary go to: http://www.comm.umn.edu/burke/gm.html