Kenneth Burke on Recalcitrance

The Prospect of Invention in Rhetorical Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine

“…Their "modest realism" was warranted by a specific reading of recalcitrance that they used to chasten rhetoricians for their "rampant rhetoricism," purportedly restoring proper proportional order to rhetorical studies of science by demarcating where those studies would lack analytical and critical purchase. It turns out, though, that the realism of Burke's recalcitrance is of a different and more encompassing order than the narrow realist version McGuire and Melia assigned to the term (Prelli, Anderson, & Althouse, 2011). problems. Sociologists (Adorjan, 2011;Andreas & Greenhill, 2010;Best, 1990;Gusfield, 1981;Perrin & Miller-Perrin, 2011;Waidzunas, 2012) developed this area of study, but rhetoricians are well equipped to contribute studies of their own.…”

“…But it is Mark P. Moore's work on synecdoche (1993,1996,2003,2009) in public discourses involving matters of science that provides the kind of detailed, specific case studies that, in my view, can enable contextgrounded disclosures of the imaginative origins of perspective and, thereby, furnish strong exemplars for work on the invention of perspective in RSSTM. Accordingly, I am at work on the invention of ecology as a science during the early decades of the twentieth century, a study that discloses a plurality of competing ecological perspectives that are separable by the tropes that prefigured them (Prelli, 2011).…”

Evaluating Creativity Through the Degrees of Solidity of Its Assessment: A Relational Approach

“…As we can see, solidity is conceptualized here as a form of recalcitrance (Burke, 1935(Burke, /1984Prelli, Anderson, & Althouse, 2011) that can be assessed in terms of degrees. The degree of solidity of a connection depends on the number of elements that object to its destruction or, conversely, on its capacity to overcome or resist objections to its existence.…”