WHEREVER YOU GO in the humanities, you will encounter Kenneth Burke’s “parlor metaphor.” Described in his 1941 book The Philosophy of Literary Form, the metaphor continues to serve as an introduction to humanistic thinking, appearing in almost every contemporary textbook in writing and literary studies. Burke, in capsule form, instructs the reader:
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 […] 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 him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you […] However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
The parlor is a promise: that analysis and argument are part of an “unending conversation” that, though begun long before us, is one to which each of us can contribute. We are mortal, but the conversation is not. If anything, we can depart the parlor confident that the conversation will go on indefinitely.
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