The Burkean Classroom

Coe, Richard M. "Critical Reading And Writing In The Burkean Classroom: A Response To Mary Salibrici." Journal Of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 42.8 (1999): 638-40. ERIC. Web. 2 Mar. 2014.

Richard Coe takes up Mary Salibrici's call for instructors to create, indeed require, dissonance, ambiguity, and complication within the composition classroom. Coe acknowledges the difficulty of getting students to pinpoint positions unfamiliar to them, especially ones that have not cross their minds. To nurture this process of critical thinking Coe draws on Salibrici's notion that rhetorical pedagogy must hinge on two levers: “language as symbolic action and perspective by incongruity” (638). Burke's concept of symbolic action requires us to see language and texts involved not just in meaning but meaning-making, it

moves us to look at utterances, texts, and other symbolic communications by asking what they do, not merely what they say. In short we need to ask about speech acts the same sorts of questions about context, motive, effect, and so forth that we would ask about any other sorts of acts. (638)

The tendency Coe wishes to push against is the belief that texts represent merely ideas, thoughts that are already transparent simply by reading a written work. Instead texts need to be understood as representations of more implicit ideas that are hidden behind the act of writing, and writing in a particular way. Coe uses the examples of “date rape” and “harvesting overmature timber” (639) to argue that language is interpellation, “leading us to see [words] in terms of the category evoked by the name” (639). Used in this way, language enters into an identity politics, citing a personality behind the print that: 1) asks readers to consider the intentionality behind the act of language, and 2) asks writers to consciously consider the rhetorical grammar that best communicates this intentionality. For Coe, then, the symbolic action of rhetoric is about more that persuading readers or listeners. It is about putting a human identity to the textual voices that occupy the Burkean conversation.

Perspective by incongruity, the other half of this coin, straddles the line between relativism and objectivity. By making students aware of divergent views of a single issue, and encouraging them to contemplate these contradictions, it becomes evident that rhetorical questions are a matter of perspective rather than questions that culminate in an easy, often unitary answer. By viewing issues through heterogeneous lenses, students begin to internalize the idea that “each perspective is less than the whole truth. Human beings can criticize a perspective only from another perspective” (639). What ensues is a closer relationship with a dialectic pursuit of truth as opposed to yes-or-no thesis questions.

In practice, Coe's suggestions read a lot like stasis theory. He encourages students to adopt what he calls “negative thinking”, explaining that “if any statement is true, there must be some sense of some context in which its contraries are true” (670, his emphasis). This means that students are tasked with devising these contrary situations that will shed light on when the opposite of what they think is true. He requires these multiple perspectives to work their way into students thesis statements, which I think is an excellent idea for avoiding yes-or-no papers (670). Another tactic of Coe's I appreciate, relating back to symbolic action, is asking students what they want their writing to do, which seems a good jumping-off point from which to consider how to best help students become better writers (as opposed to blindly critiquing a paper with suggestions that might not mean much to them) (638). Finally, one of the better recommendations Coe offers in this article is in fact a critique of Salibrici:

I would have been more comfortable if Salibrici had told us not only how she generated perspective by incongruity for her students, but also how she used it to challenge her own understanding … Perspective by incongruity ought to work for us as well as our students; and our own ability to live with dissonance and discomfort ought to be a prerequisite for asking our students to do the same. (670)

This is the part I appreciated most from the article. Beyond the obvious advantages, I think it speaks to being present in the classroom – thinking and struggling through the complex ideas that the composition classroom raises, keeping us in the moment with our students. I very much appreciated Coe's assessment of critical thinking in this piece. Of course, his notions need to be updated. Thinking back to my research from last week, I would like to consider how it might even be more productive to consider symbolic action through visual media. Reviewing television commercials is something I've done in class and it seems ripe for just this sort of discussion. By demonstrating that there is not only the idea behind a Toyota commercial, but a strong sense of identity being sold as well, I think it would be easier to then transfer this idea to the symbolic act of writing.