This essay is a description of what Burke calls a “sociological” approach to art/literature—not in the sense that the literature's content can be read as mirroring social conditions at the time of writing, but read in terms of its function within a system of social acts, including the writing of it, and in orchestration with other “actors” acting (within as well as outside the piece of writing). Any social act can be read in terms of its function within a system of and in orchestration with other actors acting.

Burke states that deciding what a (poem, action, event, project, research) does for a particular reader, we might be able to discover what it does for all readers--“cues for analyzing the sort of eventfulness the poem contains” (73). I wonder if this contradicts what Huberman says about the disconnection between the well-defined (hence, predictable) behavior of an individual in the system of individuals and the outcome in the system of all of the actions taken by all of the individuals in that system. In other words: systems have to be investigated as an aggregated whole. Of course, he doesn't go on to tell us how to investigate the whole, really...does he?

So how can I think about applying Burke's analysis of the "system" a poem or piece of literature creates and then its function, or eventfulness? How does this translate to looking at the systematicity of service-learning ideas, their social capital, their distribution?