William Rodney Herring

[My paper from the Conference on College Composition and Communication panel I put together, Composed in the Wake of Disaster: (Re)Writing the Realities of New Orleans]

Questioning the Histories of Katrina: Narrative Analysis in the Writing Classroom

In 1978, Kenneth Burke and Fredric Jameson had a brief but important exchange in the journal Critical Inquiry. Jameson first published his rereading, which he also calls a rewriting, of Burke’s dramatistic analytic as “The Symbolic Inference: or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis.” Jameson more or less applauds Burke for providing a tool we can use to conduct ideological analysis of texts, whether they be literary or other cultural artifacts or historical discourses purporting to report what “really” happened. What Jameson in this article calls ideological analysis he gives a slightly different name by the time he publishes The Political Unconscious: that is, narrative analysis. (And as an interesting side note, Jameson’s bio in this issue of Critical Inquiry describes his next project as The Political Unconscious, with the subtitle Studies in the Ideology of Form. But of course, when the work actually appears, the subtitle turns out to be Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.) In this paper, I want to offer a brief summary of the Jameson-Burke exchange by way of fleshing out a model for narrative analysis and then apply that model to two of the best and most popular histories of Hurricane Katrina.

Dana Anderson. "Questioning the Motives of Habituated Action: Burke and Bourdieu on Practice." Philosophy and Rhetoric. 37:3 (2004). 255-74.

How does one account for unconscious action in Burkean dramatism? Given that Kenneth Burke's humanism—he defines humans as "the symbol-using animal"—draws a sharp distinction between action and motion ("things move, persons act"), how do we begin to describe motive when actions effect unintended purposes?

These are precisely the questions that drive Dana Anderson to Pierre Bourdieu in search of an explanation for habituated action. In fact, Anderson shows that for Burke actions don't really have to be conscious to be analyzable—they simply have to be purposive. In other words, what we want to know is how we can wrest purpose from the agent’s ability to anticipate the outcome of her act.

But what is meant by purpose is nearly as unclear in Anderson’s article as it is in Burke (take A Grammar of Motives, for instance, wherein Burke lumps agency and purpose together—unlike his separate discussions of scene, agent, and act—a peculiar grouping, given that agency and purpose basically equate to means and ends). By purpose, do we mean intended effects (as in when something is done “on purpose”)? Or do we mean simply results (as in when something is done “to no purpose”)? If we mean the former, then clearly intention or consciousness is at issue. And if we mean the latter, we might instead need to distinguish between unintended, unforeseeable, and counter-intentional consequences. Anderson does not attend to this ambiguity of purpose. However, instead of seeing this non-attendance as (merely) a blind spot in Anderson’s essay, I think we should see it as an untapped potential.