Profiling Burke Mindhunter

Jennifer MacLennan, A Rhetorical Journey into Darkness: Crime-Scene Profiling as Burkean Analysis | KB Journal

 

Abstract: This essay focuses upon dramatistic nature of crime scene profiling, the technique used to infer the motivations that underlie a baffling but increasingly familiar human act: the “stranger killing.” It argues that this technique of interpreting the symbolic “text” of the crime scene is essentially a rhetorical method that employs—with different names—the elements and ratios of Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad. My study, like other broad applications of Burkean principles, both validates Burke’s observation of the ubiquity of the two principal dramatistic ratios (act-scene and scene-agent) and affirms the symbolic infusion of all human action, including acts of identification through extreme mortification.

Holmes as Equipment

“I Listen to Their Story, They Listen to My Comments, and Then I Pocke” by Andrew Cessna Jones
http://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2475/

This study argues that Sherlock Holmes serves as rhetorical equipment for living. Using Kenneth Burke’s theory of symbolic appeal and the critical tool proposed in the essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” I explore how Holmes responds to the rhetorical situation of early nineteenth century England and consider why the Holmes symbol continues to appeal to audiences. I conclude that rhetoric is a necessary component of the Sherlock Holmes symbol and suggest that Holmes’s famous method is rhetorical rather than syllogistic.

Morse: circumference

This one is so complex, you might have to read it twice. My favorite quote can be found at the beginning of chapter 35

“During the few minutes that Lewis was away, Morse was acutely conscious of the truth of the proposition that the wider the circle of knowledge, the greater the circumference of ignorance.”

Turns out to be a most elegant adaptation of Albert Einstein’s “As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”

 

“It is strange to relate (for a man in his profession) that in addition to incurable acrophobia, arachnophobia, myophobia, and ornithophobia, Morse also suffered from necrophobia; and had he known what awaited him now, it is doubtful whether he would have dared to view the horridly disfigured corpse at all.”

― Colin Dexter, The Riddle of the Third Mile

The Riddle of the Third Mile by Colin Dexter | Goodreads