A Note on the Dramatist Method

Mariah A. Knowles

Tue, Mar 2, 2021

A note for my SOC 955 classmates on the Dramatist method

So, there's a difference between small-c codes and Big-C Codes. Call these whatever you will. One of our goals is to build up theory that stands on Big-C Codes from the small-c codes that we've put our eyes on.

The Dramatist method was described in Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives. It is a way to guide your attention as you "read" a text. Reading, in literature, is an act of interpretation, and it is an act that moves us from small-c codes to Big-C Codes. So, nothing more, nothing less.

Following Burke, I like to think about the Dramatist method as a diagram:

The six parts of the shape ain't the thing. The six particular parts ain't even the thing. Feel free to replace any of those terms in the diagram with others like History, Capital, Practices, Materials, or Rights. Whatever. It's up to you.

The lines are what's important. With 6 basic terms, we have 6 * 6 / 2 = 18 lines. With 10 basic terms we have 10 * 10 / 2 = 50 lines. And so on. The point here is to capture sufficient complexity to get on with our work and our lives.

What you do with a diagram like this is you:

  1. Read your text
  2. Pick a line, any line from the diagram
  3. Ask yourself questions along that line
  4. Use those to pump your intuition and you write
  5. When you've exhausted that line, pick another, and keep going

That is, you write an analytic memo. The guiding questions that we read about in this class are very similar: They pump your intuition as you "listen" to your data. Same idea in Emerson's Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes: you have intuition pumping questions that get you writing memos, cause getting writing is the hardest part. If all you have are codes on the paper and no analytic memos, then your codes are bound to be thin; they won't be thick with the meaning of why we care about them in the first place.

For example, I like the Scene/Agency line. It mines a lot of nice intuition in the topic areas I'm drawn towards. Along it, I might ask, "What are the elements of the Scene, and how do they give the actors Agency?" In Jane Eyre, there is a book in the first scene. Jane uses it to read and escape her living conditions. Her cousin used the same book to beat her with. This object in the scene gave the actors agency to carry out acts.

For Burke, the purpose of a theory like the Dramatist method is to remove itself. The point is to guide your attention. Nothing more, nothing less. At the end, you have an account of the work that stands on its own.

The difference between Burke and the other texts we've read really comes towards the end of his A Rhetoric of Motive, where he thinks about the relationship between small-c codes and Big-C Codes.

All these small-c codes that we see in a text are "building up" towards something bigger.

They are little-c codes in service of some Larger-C Code.

They are all, individually, small attempts by our participants to "get at" something...bigger, whatever that is.

small-c codes ain't the thing, they're the thing that get us to the thing.

The small-c codes are in "courtship" with their Big-C Code Gods, and those Big-C Code Gods are calling them and pulling at their motives.

Or...something like that, Burke starts getting weird. I tend to take everything he says with a lot of salt.

But, to continue with my same example, the three Bronte sisters all describe "tea scenes" in all their novels, not just in Jane Eyre. But they each use those small-c codes differently. If we pay attention to what is going on in those scenes, the three sisters "build them up" towards different Big-C Codes. I can't remember who did what since it's been a while, but one uses them to get at Power and another uses them to get at Nationality.

So, given some initial Big-C Codes, I now have new questions that arise to me about them, those can guide my intuition further, either as I keep reading or keep coding or keep collecting data or whatever, and maybe I'll find new small-c codes of my own as I investigate these Big-C Codes. Whatever you call it, I've (hopefully) removed (or started to remove) Burke, and I approach giving an account of the drama that stands on its own separate from the theory that initially guided my reading.

That's the idea. I'm a human, I can only pay attention to small things at a time, and I want to get myself writing when I'm not really in a "writy" mood. So, Burke gives me a doodle I can use to help manage that. It ain't going to validate your Big-C Codes, but it'll get you writing, and writing is where thinking happens.

(And to be clear, I didn't use this for my own study, since I started with audio data and "first listen tables" at a committee member's recommendation, and I had an intuition pumping question that was meant to constantly reground me in my research question. I only use the Dramatist method when I'm approaching text data that I have no prior thinking about.)