Parlormentarians

Parlormentarians (Discussion Leaders)

Meaningful discussion of ideas—the kind that will lead to meaningful interpretation and scholarship (your Further Reading responses, your Seminar Project)—requires active participation. I’m sure you have heard this before and encountered the expectation in all of your courses. But what does active participation entail? For my answer, I would point to the rhetorician and literary critic Kenneth Burke and his famous analogy for the dramatic nature of thinking known as the Burkean parlor:

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 there, 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 her; another comes to your defense; another supports what you have to say; another disagrees. The discussion, however, is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. [Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action]

Burke reminds us that thought (creative and critical alike) is an “unending conversation” in which new ideas (and people) continually refer back to the old ideas (and people) they replace.

At the beginning of each week, one or two students will be assigned in advance to help the class advance our discussion and response to the reading. This means, as Burke reminds us, helping us review where we have been (the previous week), listen in on new reading, and suggest places we might go in the week ahead—put in your oar. Some have heard a pun there: put in your “or,” the beginnings of where you apply and extend and differ from what we have read and already understand. This isn’t a presentation or speech. Just be prepared to share responses from your commonplace book, quotations and questions and keywords from your reading, and initial ideas that you might develop for Further Reading, or beyond this week for your Seminar Project or other work you are doing as a scholar. Be prepared to review, to respond to questions, to ask the rest of us questions, to initiate new directions for discussion. The rest of the class should be prepared to respond and participate as well, since you are not lecturing. In other words, you will put in your oar for discussion in the class.

If you have any questions or want to bounce ideas, check in with me in advance. This assignment will count (10 points) in your participation grade.

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