Kenneth Burke: A Personal Retrospective

Abstract

AS RICHARD KOSTELANETZ was conducting the interview in cluded in this volume, I was plowing through Burke's Rhetoric of Motives for the first time as required reading in a persuasion class. A political science major planning to go to law school, I thought a course in persua sion would be useful. But reading Burke, I decided the course must be more theoretical than practical and hence of questionable value to me. Nevertheless, I was determined to stick it out. Two things struck me about Burke's Rhetoric: First, it seemed to be missing something, or at least that was my rationalization, confused by his discussions of killing, persuasion, identification, consubstantiality, gram-matical terms, and the texts of dead Greeks and Romans. Second, Burke seemed to be drawing his evidence and arguments from a plethora of disciplines in a most unorganized fashion. Fortunately, I was working in the university library and, rather than buy Burke's book, I had checked out an edition of Rhetoric that was bound with his Grammar of Motives. Since the Grammar was published earlier, I decided to glance through it to see if there was anything I needed to know before I could decipher the Rhetoric. I discovered in the introduction to the Grammar that the Rhetoric was to be the second of Burke's trilogy of mo tives and the Grammar of Motives provided the foundations for his Rhet oric and his later book, A Symbolic of Motives. A quick, selective reading of the Grammar introduced me to Burke's dramatis tic theory and to his basic rhetorical perspective. In fact, I found that my discovering the Grammar put me ahead of my classmates, who were still trying to figure out what killing, dead Greeks and Romans, and consubstantiality had to do with persuasion. Reading the Grammar, though, left me uneasy. The flashes of brilliance I discerned in Burke's cryptic prose intrigued me; his easy movement among works in philosophy, literature, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, and other disciplines appealed to the Renaissance man (or dilettante) in me (as a student who had changed majors often). However, I felt that there were many more insights that I could not understand be