Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change

Acknowledgments

AcknowledgInents To finish a project such as this and then to reflect upon the conditions of its possibility is to realize that there is nothing further from the truth than the commonly held belief that writing is a solitary affair. For without the instruction, encouragement, assistance, and kindness of a great many people over the past several years this book would never have gone to press. Thus I want to thank my two teachers , Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose life and work continue to orient my being and guide my thinking to this day, and Trevor Melia, for his support and generosity in the early years and his trust in my ability to find my own way in those that followed. I would also like to acknowledge those colleagues, graduate students, and friends at the University of Iowa and the University of Pittsburgh who were helpful in various ways (sometimes unbeknownst to them) as I was struggling to finish this manuscript during a most difficult time: Fred Antzack, Ben Attias, Kendall Bartch, Dieter Boxmann, David Cheshire, Sharon Crowley, Melissa Friedling, Tom Kane, Wade Kenney, John Lyne, Jane Martin, Gerald Mast, Michael C. McGee, Jan Norton, Takis Poulakos, Doug Trank, and Steve Whitson. Special thanks go, once again, to Jan Norton as well as to Marilyn Bordwell, Diane Crosby, and Kerry Johnson for their careful editorial and research assistance. I also want to express my appreciation to Raymie McKerrow, who first encouraged me to submit the manuscript to The University of Alabama Press; to the press's then-head acquisitions editor Nicole Mitchell whose letters and phone calls oftentimes conAcknowledgments / ix vinced me the task could indeed be done; and to the two still-anonymous readers of my original manuscript whose suggestions for revision had a decisive influence on the final product. lowe an exorbitant debt to James P. McDaniel both for the spirited conversations without which the last chapter of this book would have never been written and for the friendship that, at crucial moments, helped me to bear the whole Dionysian load. Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to Susan Biesecker -Mast for having seen me through from beginning to end and for always having made available to me (oftentimes at the expense of her own comfort) a safe place in which I could think, write, and dream at each step along the way. Nearly all the chapters of this book have been presented at regional , national, and international conferences or colloquia. Thus for having made it possible for me to "go public" with my work and, hence, benefit from the many exchanges that are the real gift of such events, I must thank: The Speech Communication Association (and, most particularly, The Kenneth Burke Society for having invited KB to respond to the panel on which I was presenting my work), The Summer Institute on Culture and Society, The Rhetoric Society of America, and the Southern Branch of The Kenneth Burke Society (especially David Cratis Williams, who, in organizing a special panel on Kenneth Burke's ontology and epistemology, set the scene for a conversation with James Chesebro that vastly enriched my understanding of dramatism). I also gratefully acknowledge the Office of the Provost at the University of Iowa for a Faculty Development Leave during the fall term of the 1994-95 academic year that made it possible for me to craft the final chapter of this book. Finally, I thank those publishers and authors who generously gave permission to me to quote extensively from their works: Excerpts from Criticism and Social Change by Frank Lentricchia, copyright © 1983 by the University of Chicago Press; Excerpts from Norms of Rhetorical Culture by Thomas B. Farrell, copyright © 1993 by Yale University Press; Excerpts from The Critical Theory ofTiirgen Habermas by Thomas McCarthy, copyright © 1978 by MIT Press; Excerpts from "Kenneth Burke's Grammar of Motives: Speculations on the Politics of Interpretation" by Barbara Biesecker, in Rhetoric and Ideology: Compositions and Criticisms of Power, RSA Conference Proceedings, 1989; Excerpts from A Grammar of Motives (1962), A Rhetoric of Motives (1962), The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1961), and Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature , and Method (1966) by Kenneth Burke, used by permission of the University of California Press. x / Acknowledgments Addressing Postlllodernity ...