Burke Reading

From what I could understand of the first Burke reading was that he was talking about two different types of psychology; the psychology of form and the psychology of of info.

Burke said in the reading that the artist should use the psychology of form; where the artist sets up the situation using their writing, painting, etc and then the audience is the one that feels the emotions in that situation. Burke makes a reference (okay, he makes a lot of these, to the point I was wondering if he had lost some sort of bet and had to put a ridiculous number of references in) to great plays written by Shakespeare. In those plays it is not the main characters who is really feeling the emotion but the audience who is watching.

From what I could tell Burke felt the psychology of info to be not just facts, but a kind of info dump (liker this Burke reading). He makes a reference to the idea that when Shakespeare's characters make great speeches to each other it is the audience that matters, not who they are really speaking to. If they actors tried to sit down and explain everything to each other or the audience instead of focusing on the audience's emotions then it would be less of a scene.

Pyschology of info, on the other hand seemed to be...well, not the opposite exactly. That would seem to imply that art is the opposite of information. The clossest explanation I could find is that Burk feels that art is having an increase of psychology of information and a decrease in the psychology of form. Burke feels this is bad. I could see why - if I understood what the two forms are. Art can inform, but it shouldn't have to inform; for instance Burke brings up the fact that drama is closely tied to emotions, in fact it seems to wholly focus on  it.

The second reading was about language. Specifically the idea that language is a symbol system and humans are the only ones that use this symbols system. What sets this symbol system apart from the way that other creatures communicate is that we can talk about ourselves. Burke seems to come back to the idea of self a lot in this piece as he talks about language. He also seems to imply that a symbol system is an ever evolving thing; it will never 'stay put'.

Other then that I got lost. I found the Burke reading on language to be increadably difficult. This seems to rely somewhat on lingustic concepts and I'm still learning about that. Plus this is just a high concept of language in general. I hope someone got a better grasp on this then I did because I am very confused about this second piece.