Hugh Burns’s visit to class last week was a real pleasure. Burns has an engaging and approachable personality. His talk focused on many of the foundational ideas of rhetoric like the seven liberal arts of Ancient Greece which include the trivium (logic, rhetoric, and grammar) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). The quadrivium is particularly interesting because of the assertion that students must master the seemingly disparate fields of mathematics, science, and music before grappling with philosophy. Though these ideas are literally thousands of years old, they tie in well with the emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach to higher education that Burns supports. Burns is an advocate of Writing Across the Curriculum and also considers the role of technology in areas other then English.
Burns also spoke on the four Language Arts which are speaking, writing, listening, and reading. The first two are heuristic which involves solving problems under conditions of uncertainty, while the latter two are concerned with hermeneutics or interpretation. The most interesting part of Burns’s talk was when he spoke on his area of expertise: technology. He provided an interesting perspective on programming software that applies algorithms to language. A three pronged approach to artificial intelligence was also explained by Burns, which includes knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, and search. Finally, I found his approach to writing interesting. Burns stated that he writes about four or five pages daily without completing any prior research. He said that he “tries to get the light to come on in here [motioning to his heart]” before validating his ideas through research. This ensures a certain authenticity of ideas.
Burns also spoke on Wayne Booth, a literary critic from the University of Chicago. His first and most influential book Rhetoric of Fiction defends the role of the author, specifically an “implied author” or speaker who posits some statement of truth. This idea goes against the theories of New Criticism which attempt to view a text in isolation, apart from contextual information. Other works include A Rhetoric of Irony, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Ascent, The craft of Research, and Rhetoric of Rhetoric.
Damn you take good notes, Eric. I appreciate reading your blog for all the information I failed to retain. It seems from your recounting that you too were most interested in his connection to Aristotle's rhetorical views. During his discussion of artificial intelligence, I was drawing parallels to cognitive theory--overlaying artificial models on what was supposed to be going on in a real mind. The cognitive model of a memory unit that was being worked on a processing unit in order to deliver information into a contextual situation seemed like much the same thing.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that impressed me the most about Burns was his span of knowledge "across the curiculum." I left there wishing that, along with survey courses on literature and poetry, and a more in depth course here and there on "Major Writers," we also had been asked to take a course on the classics as part of our core curriculum, because I feel most of the time as though my knowledge in that area is just a small "survey" away from being nonexistent. Oh, well, I'll just have to revisit it on my own - which is probably a good thing anyway. Thank you, Mr. Burns.
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