Charland and Burke

Kevin (Kyoo Sang) Jo

Professor Glen McClish

RWS 600 Assignment: Charland and Burke

4 November 2013

 

1.      Summary of “Language as Action: Terministic Screens”

In this article, Kenneth Burke introduces a rhetorical concept of “terministic screens” which is a certain framework of perception. This term means the filter directs attention away from some interpretations and toward others. Burke describes two different types of terministic screens: scientistic and dramatistic. “Scientistic” is a language as definition and “dramatistic” is a language as act. Also, “scientistic” describes the term as what it is or what it is not and “dramatistic” approach concerns action: thou shall or thou shall not. To explain the concept of “terministic screens,” he compares it to color filters. Even if the photograph of the same object is taken, it looks very different when a different color filter is used. In other words, the audience interprets the intended message differently through a “terministic screen” of its own vocabulary and perspective to the world. The “terministic screen” also directs the audience toward action based on interpretation of the message. According to Burke, terms we use necessarily constitute a corresponding kind of screen and any such screen necessarily directs the attention to one field rather than another.

2.      Summary of “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”

This essay offers a rhetorical analysis of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Burke identifies various concepts to explain Hitler’s rhetoric: common enemy, geographical materialization, and unification device. The idea of common enemy is a symbol of the evil against which people must unite, and it distracts the people from politically inconvenient issues by relating all evils to the common rhetorical enemy. Hitler promoted Munich as the place where all roads must lead – geography materializing the ideology of fascism. The components of Hitler’s fascist unification device are broken up into four features by Burke: inborn dignity, projection device, symbolic rebirth and commercial use. Hitler proposed the Manichean antithesis of superior: inferior (Aryan: Jews and Negroes). Projection device is getting purification by dissociation, in other words, scapegoat. Hitler gives a malign twist to a benign aspect of Christian thought by staging himself as the group’s prophet. According to Burke, Hitler's attribution of Germany's economic difficulties to "Jewish" moneylenders is the commercial use rhetoric.

3.      Comparison between Burke and Charland

I think that the concept of Burke’s terministic screens is broader than one of Charland’s constitutive rhetoric because the term “constitutive rhetoric” focuses on the specific subject, collective identity. In other words, constitutive rhetoric is interested in a group, a mass, and a collective body as the audience. However, the term “terministic screens” is a kind of language system that determines an individual’s perception and symbolic action in the world. Therefore, it can show a variety of form depending on individual’s characteristic or experience. Of course, those two concepts share a similarity in the fact that they provide the audience with a frame of perception. In constitutive rhetoric, the author invents a frame of perception by calling a common collective identity through the text. On the other hand, in terministic screens, the audiences have a frame of perception by creating terministic screens consciously and unconsciously as they perceive the world and share perspectives. Therefore, it is possible to interpret constitutive rhetoric as a kind of terministic screens. For example, when the White Paper creates Peuple Quebecois, the audiences could have Peuple Quebecois terministic screen if they become to act as Quebecers not Canadians.