Category: Poetics

  • Why Kenneth Burke is worth reading

    A colleague asked for help in understanding Kenneth Burke. I know how he feels; I had to clear a whole week to read The Rhetoric of Motives. But it turned me into a massive fan.

  • Failure Files on tour

    The developmental concept of the ‘good-enough mother’ is applicable to public life. Societies that demand perfection get into trouble because mistakes go uncorrected. But so do those that find awfulness in everything.

  • Knowing what you don’t know

    Creativity is about acting as a shaping consciousness. There is beauty and pleasure if the story leaves spaces for the imagination, and asks questions about what the writer does and does not know.