As critic, Kenneth Burke's preoccupations were at the beginning purely esthetic and literary; but afterCounter-Statement(1931), he began to discriminate a ...

Probes the nature of linguistic or symbolic action as it relates to specific novels, plays, and poems.

Permanenceand Change was written and first published in the depths of the Great Depression. Attitudes Toward History followed it two years later. These were revolutionary texts in the theory of communication, and, as classics, they retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, whereas Attitudes Towards History characterizes tactics and patterns of conflict typical of actual human associations. It is in Permanence and Change that Burke establishes in path-breaking fashion that form permeates (...) society just as it does poetry and the arts. Hence, his master idea that forms of art are not exclusively aesthetic: the cycles of a storm, the gradations of a sunrise, the stages of an epidemic, the undoing of Prince Hamlet are all instances of progressive form.This new Edition of Permanence and Change reprints Hugh Dalziel Duncan's long sociological introduction and includes a substantial new afterward in which Burke reexamines his early ideas in light of subsequent developments in his own thinking and in social theory.". (shrink)

INTRODUCTION In an age of specialists, Kenneth Burke's writings offend those who are content with a partial view of human motivation. ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.4 (2006) 333-339MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical SymmetryKenneth BurkeEdited with introduction by James ZappenNote: This untitled paper was found in two typed copies among the books and papers in Kenneth Burke's personal library in July 2006—one copy folded into a heavily used Loeb edition of Aristotle's Rhetoric, the other in a small file cabinet in the library.1 The two copies are nearly (...) identical carbon copies, probably typed by Burke's wife Libby; the original has not been found.2 The paper includes brief discussions of persuasion, identification, and dialectical symmetry (hence the current title), plus brief critiques of behaviorism and general semantics, with specific reference to Alfred Korzybski's notion of the structural differential. It was probably written in the mid-1940s, after the second edition of Korzybski's Science and Sanity and The Philosophy of Literary Form, both published in 1941; perhaps at roughly the same time as the more extended discussions of behaviorism and Korzybski in A Grammar of Motives, published in 1945; and before the full development of Burke's ideas about persuasion, identification, and dialectical symmetry in A Rhetoric of Motives, published in 1950. The paper might have been prepared for a public lecture or for circulation among Burke's literary friends, as a brief commentary on some of the key concepts in A Rhetoric of Motives, while he was completing A Grammar of Motives or perhaps shortly following its publication. If so, then it might have been written as late as 1947.3This paper suggests that Burke's concept of identification was in part a creative response to current issues in behaviorism and general semantics, formulated in sympathy with George Herbert Mead's observations on identification, communication, and community in Mind, Self, and Society and The Philosophy of the Act and in opposition to Korzybski's general semantics and his structural differential. Moreover, and more important, this paper suggests that the final section of A Rhetoric of Motives, titled simply "Order," is essential to a complete understanding of Burke's ideas about persuasion and identification since only in this last section does Burke show how competing points of view [End Page 333] might be reconciled in an ultimate identification via the dialectical symmetry that he traces through the long history of Platonic thought.4James P. Zappen Department of Language, Literature, and Communication Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute* * *What, in sum, would be the salient traits of Aristotle's Rhetoric?5 And what would be our attitude towards them?His "art" is constructed about his stress upon persuasion as the purpose of rhetoric. Hence he surveys the resources of rhetoric, to the end that one might use the best means available for a given situation. To narrow down the choice of means, he makes a division into kinds of oratory: deliberative (concerned with the expediency of steps still to be taken); forensic (concerned with the justice or injustice of past acts); and demonstrative or epideictic (concerned with praise and blame, primarily involving the present). But to be effective in any of these kinds, one must appeal to the opinions of one's audience—hence the lists of "topics" reviewing such opinions. First he considers the components of happiness, on the grounds that all men aim at happiness, hence this topic figures in all persuasion and dissuasion. For deliberative oratory specifically, he lists the topics naming men's opinions as to the good, the expedient, and their opposites (along with relevant observations on different forms of government). His topics for epideictic, dealing with praise and blame, comprise the things men consider virtuous and vicious. And his list of forensic topics has to do with the motives and effects of just and unjust acts. Also, there are such general topics as the possible and impossible, the more and the less, the likely and the unlikely.Enthymemes (deductions based on opinion) fit well with forensic, he says. Rhetorical induction (example) best suits the deliberative. And to epideictic, amplification (auxesis... (shrink)

Cicero could both orate and write a treatise on oratory. A dog can bark but he can’t write a tract on barking. If all typically symbol-using animals were suddenly obliterated, their realm of symbolic action would be correspondingly obliterated. The earth would be but a realm of planetary, geologic, meteorological motion, including the motions of whatever nonhuman biological organisms happened to survive. The realm of nonsymbolic motion needs no realm of symbolic action; but there could be no symbolic action unless (...) grounded in the realm of motion, the realm of motion having preceded the emergence of our symbol-using ancestors; and doubtless the time will come when motions go on after all our breed will have vanished. Kenneth Burke is now developing the implications of the position stated in the present essay. He is also editing his Symbolic of Motives, a work designed to complement his Grammar of Motives and Rhetoric of Motives. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" , "Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" , "A Critical Load, Beyond that Door; or, Before the Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy" , and "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment" . The first section of " Motion/ Action" was presented at a symposium at New York University in May 1976 and will appear in a slightly altered version in the report of those proceedings, Psychoanalysis, Criticism, and Creativity: A French-American Dialogue. (shrink)

Fredric Jameson's exacting essay, "The Symbolic Interference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis" Critical Inquiry 4 [Spring 1978]: 507-23) moves me to comment. I shall apply one of my charges of my title to him, he applies the other to me. The matter is further complicated by the fact that there is a distance at which they are hard to tell apart. For any expression of something implies a repression of something else, and any statement that goes only so far (...) is analyzable as serving to forestall a statement that goes farther. And I can't go as far as I think if I share with Jameson what I take to be his over-investment in the term "ideology." . . . the line between the implicit and the explicit being so wavering, there are many cases where the distinctions between conscious and unconscious become correspondingly blurred. But the kind of methodological repression that is implicit in Jameson's hermeneutic model can be wasteful beyond necessity. For it encourages him to be so precociously prompt in his "rereading" of a text that he doesn't allow his readers to read a single sentence of it. He doesn't tell them what Sinn, in its own terms, my text has on the subject of "ideology," "mystification," and the "unconscious." Instead, he cuts corners and settles for a report of the Bedeutung that it has for him. In this case the procedure is particularly wasteful because Jameson is highly intelligent, and if it weren't for the bad leads of his models he's the last man in the world who would have to be so bluntly inaccurate as he is on this occasion. I believe that he could put me through quite a trying ordeal if he could have but kept on the subject and pursued me accordingly. Kenneth Burke's previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes" , "Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" , " Motion/ Action" , and a hermeneutic fantasy, "A Critical Load . . ." . He would like us to mention that William Willeford, the interlocutor of a section in " Motion/ Action," is a professor of English at the University of Washington. (shrink)

There is no end to possible theories of motivation, with their corresponding ways of defining and classifying motives. Our hero can do what he does because he is of some particular religion, race, nationality, social class, historical tradition, occupation, personality type, or glandular makeup or has been psychologically wounded in one or another of the ways specified by the various competing experts. If we say that he did as he did because of the situation in which he was placed, there (...) can be endless variation in our terms for what he did; and the situation in which he did it can be interpreted in terms of varying scope, ranging from a view of his act as done against a background of one or many gods more or less actively concerned with his conduct or against a purely secular background of “nature” (“environment” variously interpreted); or we may place his act with reference to the most minutely particular of circumstances, as when explaining exactly why Mr. Q., Republican, retired, Yale graduate, wearing glasses, and just having quarreled with his wife, turned his car exactly as he did in the particular combination of factors that made up one particular traffic accident. In view of such a motivational jungle, a good basic proposition to have in mind when contemplating the study of motives would be: Anybody can do anything for any reason. (shrink)

Dedicated to the humanisticissimus and/or humanisticissima Editoreality of Critical Inquiry, an enterprise that is doing all possible to restore for Criticism its rightful home, namely: a state of perpetual Crisis. How now?You say"The manwalks down the street." Then tell me howyour wordsmake sense. Kenneth Burke's contributions to Critical Inquiry are "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" , " Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" , " Motion/ Action" ,and "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment".

Booth says, "Burke seems to be claiming to know better than Keats himself some of what the poem 'means', and the meaning he finds is antithetical not just to the poet's intentions but to any intentions he might conceivably have entertained!" The notion underlying my analysis is this: Formal social norms of "propriety" are related to poetic "propriety" as Emily Post's Book of Etiquette is to the depths of what goes on in the poet's search "for what feels just right." (...) Wellek stops with Emily Post. The official aesthetic isn't likely to cover the ground. If I may offer a perhaps "outrageously" honorific example, on pages 329-30 of my Language as Symbolic Action, when discussing a sonnet of mine, "Atlantis," I indicate how one can both know and not know when one's imagination is working at a level of "propriety" not reducible to the official code. My lines had a Swiftian, Aristophanic dimension; and though they were not "programmatically" so designed, my experience with them both ab intra and ab extra indicates how such things can operate.Kenneth Burke's numerous writings include The Complete White Oxen , Towards a Better Life , Collected Poems, and among his critical works, A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, Language as Symbolic Action, and The Philosophy of Literary Form. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "ARTISTS ON ART: Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" , " Motion/ Action" , "CRITICAL RESPONSE: A Critical Load, Beyond that Door; or, Before the Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy", and "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment". (shrink)

Underlying these pages is the assumption that, since we begin life as speechless bodies, the radicality of religious and poetic utterance somehow retains its relation to these origins, though in maturing we develop far from the order of reality we began with. Such expression must be rooted in man's primal essence as a speechless body, albeit there develops the technical "grace" of language . I take it that the body, as a physiological organism, is always behaving in the "specious present." (...) Though we, as "persons," may anticipate or recall, the body as such is always behaving in a certain way now. If a believer is praying, his body cannot lie. If he is offering a prayer of thanks and really means it, his body behaves in one way. If he doesn't really mean it, his body behaves in a different way, though the vocables uttered in the prayer may be the same in both cases, and they may sound much less sincere to us if we hear them uttered by a genuine believer than as uttered by an accomplished tartuffe. In that sense it is by the speechless body that the person communicates with the nature of things. Kenneth Burke develops in this essay some behavioristic speculations that first exercised him in an early volume, Permanence and Change . Those speculations are pursued further in an essay, " Motion / Action," which appears in the Summer 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry. His other contributions are "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" , "A Critical Load, Beyond that Door; or, Before the Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy" , and "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment". (shrink)

When Kenneth Burke conceived his celebrated "Motivorum" project in the 1940s and 1950s, he envisioned it in three parts. While the third part, A Symbolic of Motives, remains unfinished and unpublished, A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) have become canonical theoretical documents. A Rhetoric of Motives was originally envisioned as a two-part book. Here is the until-now unpublished War of Words, the second volume of A Rhetoric of Motives. The War of Words brilliantly exposes and (...) theorizes the rhetorical devices that sponsor war in the name of peace. Discouraging militarism during the Cold War even as it details a catalog of contemporary persuasive tactics and strategies, Burke's book exposes how popular news media outlets can, wittingly or not, foment international tensions and armaments during tumultuous political periods. Chapters include "The Devices," "Scientific Rhetoric," "The Rhetoric of Bureaucracy," and "The Rhetorical Situation," along with an introductory chapter from the editors and a short introduction by Burke himself. With The War of Words, Kenneth Burke's influence and scholarly importance continues to play a prominent role in the field of rhetoric and literary criticism today"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)