Here is Kenneth Burke, genius and author of a number of important books. The one that has heroic status for WCD is Language as Symbolic Action. Burke read about ten languages and loved Scholastic philosophy -- see St. Thomas Aquinas, just below -- and belonged to the Communist party for a while and knew Shakespeare by heart and had read everything in the world. He invented structuralism before there were structuralists, and symbolic anthropology before there were symbolic anthropologists, and "sociopoetics" before WCD had begun work on sociopoetics. He is also to be found on every page (so to speak) of WCD's The Epistolary Moment and Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut.
The saint on the right is
Thomas Aquinas. The picture is a very bad reproduction, which
is grossly unfair to his friend Carpaccio, who painted it. Carpaccio
is a true genius. Carpaccio painted the picture of 
St.
George and the dragon in that little chapel in Venice that WCD
can never remember the name of, but which he urges you not to
miss the next time you are in Venice. You just look pious
and the man at the door lets you in. It doesn't hurt to
lay a few lira on him while you are looking pious, however.
St. Thomas was in WCD's estimation one of the great ones, incredibly smart and subtle and also sensible. He was called the Angelic Doctor, because all his writings were dictated to him by the angel whom you may just glimpse in the lower right-hand corner of the picture. He was a bulky saint, doubtless due to his need to stoke up on carbohydrates after a day of subtle scholastic distinctions. When he was a student, the other students called him "the Bull." His teacher, Albertus Magnus, said "Be kind, my young friends. Some day the world will be filled with the roaring of this bull." And so, in a way, it was.
This is, you guessed it, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the major formative influences on WCD's thinking. He is today looked down on by all WCD's analytic philosopher friends, and too many people are writing novels and making films about him instead of reading the Blue and Brown books, but the wheel goes round and eventually he will be recognized as one of the three major philosophers of the twentieth century. His life was just amazing, and so was his character and personality, but his way of doing philosophy was better than either.
The distinguished person
on the right is Paul Ricoeur, in WCD's estimation one of the great
philosophers of the 20th century. He absorbed Husserlian phenomenology,
the neo-Kantianism of Cassirer and his circle, French structuralism,
and Anglo-American analytic philosophy, while proceeding with
a single powerful 
philosophical project that has
displayed extraordinary depth and originality over a nearly 50-year
period. When French thought was going through its "Maoist"
period, with the Tel Quel group sucking up to whomever seemed
the gauchist du jour, Ricoeur was virtually ostracized in his
own country. Recently, younger French thinkers have rediscovered
him, and what one recent account calls "la consecration"
of Ricoeur is well under way: "En 1988 sonne l'heure de la
consecration lorsque toute une jeune generation intellectuelle
decouvre avec ravissment la force et la coherence d'une pensee
qui s'est constamment enrichie sans cesser de forer dans la meme
direction. Il devient alors pour beaucoup le modele meme de l'intellectual
toujours interpelle par l'evenement et essayant d'y repondre non
en maitre penseur main en maitre a pense." The person
you see talking to Paul Ricoeur in the picture is the young WCD,
sans barbe but full of intellectual earnestness, for whom
daily philosophical discussion with Ricoeur was a life-changing
experience.
The person facing us is
Northrop Frye, the Toronto literary theorist who was, along
with Wimsatt and 
Brooks at Yale and Poirier and
Edwards at Rutgers, the greatest influence on WCD's thinking about
literature and literary studies. He is in total disrepute right
now, but his theoretical thinking was worth whole shelves worth
of the stuff that now passes for "theory" in English
departments. He will come back, and when he does the discipline
of literary studies will have begun anew. This cannot, in WCD's
opinion, happen a minute too soon.
The picture shows Northrop Frye receiving an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College in 1967. The man with his back to the camera is John Sloan Dickey, who was president of Dartmouth when WCD enrolled there in 1962. The stump in the picture is the Old Pine, which stood proudly above the original College -- consisting of just one building in those days -- when it was founded in 1769. It survives now in several college songs and the occasional graduation picture.
This picture is David Levine's wonderful caricature of Northrop Frye as Moses. The occasion was Frye's publication of his last book, The Great Code, which is about the Bible in Western Literature. The book that WCD suggests that his students to start with is The Educated Imagination. It is a "popular" version of Frye's great work The Anatomy of Criticism -- it was originally a series of lectures given over the CBC -- and is a good way to begin to understand what he is doing in the Anatomy.
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