I was in a graduate course on the Theory of the Lyric at Stanford in the early 1980s. As each student gave the required presentation, the professor would simply take over and explain the reading himself at a certain point, usually about 5 minutes in, and not allow any student to finish. I decided this would not happen to me, so I prepared my presentation on Kenneth Burke's reading of Cleanth Brooks' reading of a Keats' Ode, in The Grammar of Motives, as a coherent talk, rather than doing whatever the other hapless students before me had done. I had read a lot of Burke before taking the course and so I had chosen to sign up for a reading that would play to my strengths. The professor, whom I won't name here, allowed me to finish, and I turned my awkwardness in differentiating between the similarly sounding names Burke and Brooks (I've never pronounced the r very well) to my own comic advantage. I'm not sure why this memory came back to me today as I was reading something else by Kenneth Burke. Grad school was filled with brilliant students, and I certainly felt out of my theoretical depth many times, often experiencing Stanford as what we would now call a "hostile environment," but the advantage I held was knowing who I was and what I had to say, and figuring out how to get where I want to go.
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I only recently -- as in, a couple of years ago -- discovered the Grammar of Motives. I checked it out of the library. I still have it. I've got to read it, it's the kind of thing I went to graduate school to read although it was out of fashion then.
This post reminded me to add an epigraph to a recent post of mine. Thanks.
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