Professor Burke's “Bennington Project”

Abstract

Kenneth Burke claimed in 1952 that he viewed his rhetorical theory and critical method as a "Bennington Project," a sign that he attributed a measure of his intellectual success to teaching at pragmatist-inspired Bennington College. Studying Burke's teaching at Bennington can help scholars to better understand his theory and method because Burke taught undergraduates his own critical reading practices, ones that he believed heightened students' awareness of terministic screens and deepened their appreciation for the consequences of human symbol-use. Burke's teaching practices and his comments on student essays reveal that he taught indexing and charting to his undergraduates because he believed everyone can and should use them throughout their lives to examine—and, when necessary, revise—the often unexpressed assumptions that propel so much human activity toward competition and, ultimately, physical and social destruction.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Jack Selzer, Jessica Enoch, the editor, two anonymous reviewers, and his colleagues in the Faculty Research Group at WVU for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. For providing valuable assistance during the research process, he would like to thank Brian Pietras of the Bennington College Alumni Programs Office; Joe Tucker of Bennington College's Edward Clark Crossett Library; and Sandy Stelts and her entire staff in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room at Penn State University. Thanks also goes to Anthony Burke, co-trustee of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust, for his permission to use his father's letters and teaching materials in this article. Finally, the author's sincere appreciation goes to Kenneth Burke's former students who took time to share their stories of participating “with charming patience” in “the working-out” of their professor's ideas.

Notes

¹As Burke explained later in this letter, a “kindly and helpful person” had recently pointed out to him that “the glad tidings of [his] course had already been dropped from the College Bulletin” for the upcoming academic year. The news came at a bad time for Burke because he recently had turned down John Crowe Ransom's invitation to teach a six-week summer course at Indiana University. Burkhardt explained in a follow-up letter that the mistake had been Bennington's, for the school thought Burke had already accepted the teaching position at Indiana for the 1952–1953 academic year. He tells Burke, “Consider the whole erased. We want you to come back.” Also of interest in this letter is Burkhardt's note about Burke's self-assessment of his work: “I thoroughly agree with your notion of your relation to Bennington and I'm proud that you feel that way about it. So I take you at your word that the project would get some help and inspiration from teaching and this seems to me to be a good and sufficient reason for you to keep to the schedule” (Burkhardt to Burke, 17 February 1952).

²In its 2001 “Guidelines for the Ethical Treatment of Students and Student Writing in Composition Studies,” the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) explained the need for researchers both to obtain students' permission to use their writing in published research (486–487) and to avoid identifying students by name when quoting or paraphrasing their writing (488). To address the former concern, I contacted the Bennington College Alumni Relations Office to search for the students whose work I refer to in this article; at the time I resubmitted this article, I had received permission from eight of Burke's former students to refer to their work. Having been unsuccessful in contacting the remaining four students, while nevertheless being aware of the CCCC's latter concern, I have decided to include all of the students' names in this article for two specific reasons. First, I quote Burke's comments on student essays rather than the students' writing itself. Second, I believe using students' names, rather than pseudonyms, will aid scholars who study these archival materials, as Burke labeled his comments with the respective student's name at the top of each typewritten page. For further details on the CCCC's research guidelines, see “Guidelines for the Ethical Treatment of Students and Student Writing in Composition Studies,” College Composition and Communication 52.3 (2001): 485–490.

³Through the revision process, a detailed discussion of the history and educational philosophy of Bennington College has come to be beyond the scope of the present article. For a history of the school's founding, see Brockway, who was a professor of history at Bennington College in the 1960s and 1970s. Jones and Soule, meanwhile, report on the ways in which the college was and was not fulfilling its educational mission 15 and 30 years, respectively, after its founding.

⁴For a recent attempt to understand the origin and meaning of the phrase “Ad bellum purificandum,” see James P. Zappen, S. Michael Halloran, and Scott A. Wible, “Some Notes on ‘Ad bellum purificandum,’” KB Journal 3.2 (Spring 2007): < http://kbjournal.org/node/201 > . M. Elizabeth Weiser has also offered an answer to the question of why the purpose of Burke's critical project would be “the purification of war.” See “Burke and War: Retheorizing the Theory of Dramatism,” Rhetoric Review 26.3 (2007): 286–302.

⁵In his response to Uli Beigel's first essay, Burke explains how he saw this collection of readings working together:

I was saddened that you thought my “Psychology and Form” essay “almost a contradiction” of De Gourmont. Here's how I thought they might fit together: “Psychology and Form” discusses the arousing of expectations (attitudes) on the part of the audience. Aristotle's Rhetoric lists kinds of associations that could be exploited to this purpose. De Gourmont's essay deals with such altered kinds of attitude as might go with acts of dissociation. I shall consider this matter further when on the subject of “perspective by incongruity.” (1955)

Burke asked students to read Coleridge's piece, meanwhile, to observe how he “prepar[es] the grounds for a dissociation that will distinguish between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ (whereas they were originally thought of as synonyms, phantasia being the Greek equivalent of the Latin imaginatio)” (Burke, Response to Shelia Solomon's first essay, 1955).

⁶Bennington College did not become fully co-educational until 1969. In 1935, however, it did begin to admit men to the Bennington Theater Studio Program (“A Bennington Timeline”).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott Wible

Scott Wible is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, West Virginia University, 1503 University Avenue, Morgantown, WV 26506-6296, USA. E-mail: [email protected]