Parlor Talk

Greetings LIT 500 colleagues! It's hardly a jazz-soaked coffee house, but here's another meeting place for us. We'll see if it serves us (at times we may well need to bridge the Thursday-to-Thursday span), but hopefully it will allow us to mix the serious with the frivolous, the theoretical with the practical; certainly some irreverence will be needed as we get deeper into the semester's readings. For now, perhaps that lovely Kenneth Burke passage from The Philosophy of Literary Form offers the appropriate sentiments for launching this new blog, for readying your oars:

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got here, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."