Present at the Creation: Kenneth Burke at the First CCCC

Abstract

Though it has been insufficiently noticed, Kenneth Burke spoke at the first meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Chicago on March 25, 1950. Archival sources reveal that his remarks—“Rhetoric—Old and New”—drew from his recently completed A Rhetoric of Motives and from another volume, The War of Words, that he intended to publish separately. Burke sought to restore instruction in rhetoric to composition courses, explained his newly developed concept of “identification,” and later saw the published version of his remarks mysteriously missing from the first issue of College Composition and Communication.

Notes

¹ We thank RR reviewers John Trimbur and Duane Roen for valuable suggestions on an earlier version of this essay. Quotations from letters by Kenneth Burke are included here with the permission of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust.

² Coxwell-Teague and Lunsford acknowledge that “that first conference . . . featured papers by such luminaries . . . as Wallace Douglass, James M. McCrimmon, Richard M. Weaver, Harold Allen, S. I. Hayakawa, Robert Pooley, and Paul Diederich,” but they do not mention Burke or his “Rhetoric—Old and New” (xv). In addition to the sources that we have mentioned, Phillips, Greenberg, and Gibson in their essay about “the genesis of the discipline” also make no mention of Burke’s presence at the first CCCC. But we do acknowledge that Jessica Enoch does mention in passing that Burke “made a presentation at the 1950 Conference on College Composition and Communication” in her essay on Burke’s critical pedagogy (275). Incidentally, in keeping with Goggin and Bartholomae (and for reasons made clear in the remainder of this essay), we describe the March 1950 event as the “first” CCCC meeting. But when Keith Gilyard created the program for the 1999 CCCC, he called it “the 50th anniversary” and reproduced the initial pages of the program of the April 1-2, 1949 “Conference on College Freshman Courses in Composition and Communication sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English.”

³ Warren’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel All the King’s Men had been published in 1946.

⁴ One of the undergraduates in Humanities 3 was a precocious Susan Sontag. She later wrote that Burke’s “approach confirmed the Chicago method of close reading. I remember we spent three months on one shortish novel of Conrad’s, Victory, reading and discussing it line by line” (164). Burke’s syllabus for the course indicates that his goal was “to give the students practice in the writing of criticism, with emphasis placed upon methods of note-taking” and three formal writing assignments; “also there will be short ad interim themes, discussing a work’s main developments” (Booth).

⁵ Wayne Booth was finishing his dissertation at Chicago that year, but we have found no archival evidence that he participated in the meetings, which were probably limited to members of the undergraduate faculty.

⁶ Thanks to Kelly Ritter, we obtained a copy of the official program for the March 24-25 meeting of CCCC. It confirms that Burke was the only speaker at the March 25 luncheon and that his title was “Rhetoric—Old and New” (Flesch spoke at the opening general session on March 24). In his directions to Burke from letters dated March 13 and March 20, 1950, Gerber advised Burke at first that he could have up to sixty minutes to talk if he was the only speaker and thirty minutes if there were two speakers, but in the second letter indicated that Burke would be the only luncheon speaker. Incidentally, if there is any need for further proof that Burke spoke at the CCCC meeting in 1950, see the note attached to the first page of “Rhetoric—Old and New” in the Journal of General Education: “This article is adapted from a recent address before a conference on college composition and communication” (202).

⁷ Burke’s tone was influenced by Sams’s disappointment at Burke’s absence from CCC. “I have just received a copy of the sleazy little sheet [CCC!] published by the crowd you spoke to last spring, and to my disgust your fine speech is not in it. If you are not tired of my scratching after you for aid and assistance, I wish you would write Charles Roberts at Illinois and tell him to send the ms. onto me. I want it [for JGE] and will print it with pride.”

⁸ See Masters and Ritter for respectful assessments of Roberts’s long career as conscientious overseer of freshman rhetoric at Illinois from 1939-1960. Roberts would have had no objection to Burke’s commitment to rhetoric—Roberts’s title was Chair of Rhetoric—and it could be that the deletion of Burke’s essay wasn’t even his decision. In any event, Burke did not appear in CCC until twenty-seven years later. In the meantime, Marie Hochsmuth [Nichols] introduced Burke to speech professors, to great effect, in her 1952 review of A Rhetoric of Motives in the Quarterly Journal of Speech.

⁹ In that same letter, incidentally, Burke described “Rhetoric—Old and New” as “the first modest preview of the Devices” that he had written about in “The War of Words.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack Selzer

James Beasley, associate professor of English at the University of North Florida, has published essays in Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and elsewhere on the impact of University of Chicago faculty on composition instruction. His book on the subject will soon be published by Peter Lang.

Jack Selzer, Paterno Family Liberal Arts Professor Emeritus at Penn State University, has written extensively on works by Kenneth Burke. The University of California Press has just published The War of Words, a “lost” work by Burke (first intended as part of A Rhetoric of Motives) that is edited by Selzer, Kyle Jensen, and Anthony Burke.