History Bump

I think that your connection to Burke here is real and important, yet I think that White is trying to do something "bigger" than Burke is with terministic screens. (This is not to say that the whole of Burke's work is limited -- yada yada yada -- I am just speaking of this specific concept.) I think that White would absolutely agree that there are terministic screens that help us manage and recognize information that is strange and different, and that he sees this kind of recognition in works like Burke, Freud, Piaget which are all seemingly talking about the same thing, but in different field specific language.

So to me the difference becomes one of scope. Burke, like Bloom who White references often, is discussing language and poetics giving a framework that White hopes to extend in his discussion. But additionally, I think that White is trying to disrupt and reconfigure (through his use of tropics) how we classify and analyze information in the human sciences (rhetorical studies being part of that greater narrative). White's interrogation uses Burke's trope to establish how mutable and biased these seemingly "factual" discourses are. But ultimately his project is to intervene in the epistemic function of tropes as tools for analysis. First, charting how they function across disciplines and then showing how they can shift our knowledge making paradigm because of the recognition of their patterns and limited ability to fully represent objects and thoughts in language. White is really big on the slippage between the word that represents and the thing that it represents. Words can only approximate the actual object, and the spaces where terministic screens and tropes function encapsulate those limits.

So Burke is in there, but I would think that White would see him as one of the many instances of tropes at work in a particular human science discipline.

It's interesting to think of Burke's terministic screens in the context of White's tropics of discourse—a fertile connection. It's hard to make a logical connection, though (at least at this point). White is a rhetoric (and specifically Burke) enthusiast; he finds in rhetoric a way of articulating history. He's writing during the escalation of the "rhetorical turn," when everybody in every discipline was deciding that rhetoric was the way of understanding how their discipline worked (god bless 'em). So there are endless possibilities for Burke's influence on White. Maybe as we read closely through White, we'll find a specific reference to terministic screens, but I don't remember any. And terministic screens are related to but different from tropes. I'll leave it to the Burkeans to specify how!

do we know any? burkeans, i mean? just wondering. so for now, i should 1) file away that connection/influence, & 2) read white as if he's saying something new, which he probably is, but w/o trying to match it to burke, b/c even if there's overlap, focusing on it would be more narrowing than letting it go?

what's troubling me about that, i think, is that in how you're describing this (becky, & maybe jen too, although frankly, jen, i'm a little lost), burke seems to be writing in/for a particular niche and white's trying to look at similarities between that niche, other niches, & all historical, defining, world-classifying discourse. but in my head, burke's terministic screens are the academic terminology we're supposed to use for the "well, duh" blanket theory about human mind of "perspective both limits & enables perception." so it's a little like the "is rhet a subset of comp or is comp a subset of rhet " debate, at least over here in my head. w/my termininstic screens. although i'm probably mired in metaphor, light years from that ironic self-reflection white puts at the apex of his evolutionary chart...