Burke's Concept Research Articles

Kenneth Burke's discovery of dramatism

Burke's short article, “Twelve Propositions by Kenneth Burke on the Relation Between Economics and Psychology,” compresses the ideas presented in Attitudes Toward History, generates a new synthesis of Marx and Freud, and adumbrates the system of Dramatism. Burke's conception of the self, the community, and communication come together here for the first time in a serious argument for drama as a model of human relations.

Solzhenitsyn on detente: A study of perspective by incongruity

Kenneth Burke's concept of “perspective by incongruity” names a strategy for transcending an unsatisfactory situation. Two speeches delivered by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the United States during 1975 illustrate the use of the strategy to discount the Soviet‐American diplomacy of detente. After debunking Marxist ideology and capitalist concessions to communist nations, he posited an absolute moral order as the ground for a genuine detente

John Morley and the Irish question: Chart‐prayer‐dream

Attempts to circumscribe “the Burkean method” of rhetorical criticism can be frustrating. Critics more profitably might use Burke as an example and a prod, appropriating—as was done in this study—whichever of Burke's concepts, methods, and metaphors seem applicable to a given rhetorical event. Burke's “chart‐prayer‐dream” trilogy, together with his understanding of “strategies,” was employed to examine Morley's “Home Rule” speech before the Oxford Union in 1888. Morley's reply to Randolph Churchill abandoned propositional argument in favor of reviv‐alistic‐exhortation early in the speech; his strategies of form, argument, labelling, style, and mimesis are best understood as those of the High Priest seeking a confessional and an act of expiation from his auditors.

Kenneth Burke's concept of motives in rhetorical theory

Recognizing the centrality of motives in Burke's rhetorical theory, the authors suggest that the concept has so far not been adequately dealt with. The article begins with an explanation of the pentad, whose elements are “five motivational points of view.” The terms of the pentad can be assigned to the elements in a human event only after an examination of the event; nothing is to be assumed. The authors recognize that others—Holland, Nichols, Fisher, for example—have drawn various connections between the pentad and motives, but each has been too narrow in a different way. The first point to be made is that each element in the pentad is the locus or potential locus of motive forces. Then, acknowledging the suggestion by Ling that each man describes a human situation by featuring and ordering particular elements in the pentad, the authors argue that such featuring implicitly also features the motives associated with those elements. They then speculate about what featuring tells us of various periods in rhe...

A pentadic analysis of senator Edward Kennedy's address to the people of massachusetts, July 25, 1969

Using Kenneth Burke's concept of the pentad as the principal tool for content analysis? an examination was made of Senator Edward Kennedy's address of July 25, 1969. That analysis suggests that the speech depicted Kennedy as the victim of a scene he could not control and as the potential victim of other agents, the people of Masachusetts.

Edmund Burke's Conception of the Role of Reason in Politics

B RITISH AND AMERICAN SCHOLARS have generally taken Edmund Burke for utilitarian and an empiricist with keen sense of historical development, qualified by certain religious prepossessions which inclined him to conservatism. In nineteenth century, to mention but two examples, Leslie Stephen understood Burke as rejecting metaphysics in favor of utilitarian principles derived solely from experience,1 and John Morley took it as obvious that Burke's norm of political morality the standard of convenience, of interest of greatest number, of utility and expediency.2 In present century late Harold Laski described Burke as a utilitarian who convinced that what old valuable by mere fact of its arrival at maturity. According to Laski, political philosophy for Burke was nothing . . . but accurate generalization from experience. . . . Nothing more alien ifrom Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. only safeguard he could find in empiricism.3 Laski, like several other writers, traced Burke's empiricism to what he considered to be its roots in critical theories of David Hume. The metaphysics of he said, so far as one may use term he would himself have repudiated, are largely those of Hume.4 An American, Victor Hamm, surmised that Burke, in revolt against decadent nominalism which he had studied in Trinity College, Dublin, had turned, not to Hume, but to similar epistemological theory of David Hartley.5 More recently Morton Frisch has advanced thesis that Burke agreed with Aristotle in regard to practice but parted company with him, by rejecting supremacy of theory. Rather, he says, Burke adopted position taken by Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature and maintained that passions, and not reason, form natural