Burke's Pentad Research Articles

The 1984 campaign rhetoric of representative George Hansen: A pentadic analysis

This essay employs Kenneth Burke's pentad to examine rhetorical choices made by former U.S. Congressman George Hansen of Idaho as he dramatized two situations: his felony conviction in April of 1984 and his subsequent reelection bid. Hansen's rhetoric was designed to eliminate any personal responsibility for his conviction and to encourage voters to support his reelection on the basis of his past record as a defender of their rights and as their protector from harassment by the federal government. The essay concludes speculatively, suggesting that although Hansen did not win the November, 1984 election, his rhetoric was largely effective because it resulted in substantial identification with the voters of Idaho's Second Congressional District.

The perfected drama of reverend Jerry Falwell

Brock's (1985) recent suggestion that rhetorical critics who work out of the philosophy of dramatism could enrich their analyses by utilizing Burke's pentad and terms for order in combination is taken up in this essay. Enhancing these grammatical and formal features of drama through application of Burke's “principle of perfection,” nine “indexes of dramatic intensity” are proposed and were employed in a study of the tragic‐symbol preaching of Rev. Jerry Falwell. Falwell's televised discourses are found to be strongly dramatic and appropriately so, given the audience of true believers bent on changing society he addresses.

Modern use of theprogymnasmatain teaching rhetorical invention

ly to students, but create an impression for some that the techniques are purely activities for fun, trivial interludes that don't contribute substantially to a finished paper. In addition, some teachers fear the freedom these techniques allow students and believe more controlled instruction is needed. On the other hand, structured heuristics such as Burke's Pentad and Young, Becker, and Pike's Tagmemic Grid provide systems to guide inquiry, but often are so abstract, acontextual and complex that they are difficult for students to apply and sometimes seem to intrude on rather than to aid the composing process. I Aware of problems with both approaches and having little time to present them fully, a majority of us, I would guess, take the middle road and briefly introduce students to invention techniques before quickly moving on to other concerns.2 Problems in reconciling free and structured heuristics have appeared in several articles.3 In the end, a number of theorists say that structure and freedom, reason and intuition, consciousness and unconsciousness aren't mutually exclusive: Each school of heuristics contains elements of the other. For example, free writing theorists Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow advocate that after students use automatic or stream-of-consciousness writing, they should consciously seek patterns in their free writing-or in Elbow's words, an emerging center of gravity (20), which can then be used to generate and organize more discourse. And structuralist Richard Young points out the guiding, not dictating nature of heuristics. Young emphasizes that systematic heuristics do not always work consciously: Although more or less systematic, a heuristic search is not wholly conscious or mechanical; intuition, relevant knowledge, and skill are also necessary. A heuristic is an explicit strategy for effective guessing ( 135). Since the two approaches contain aspects of each other, there should be pedagogies that integrate both heuristics. But how? I believe a way of addressing the problem of how teachers can integrate free and structured inquiry effectively can be found in the classical progymnasmata, exercises designed to train the classical student in the art of inventio. While the classical tradition may suggest a rhetoric that is unduly prescriptive to some

Structured Heuristic Procedures: Their Limitations

To help students invent or prewrite or limit a subject, many composition specialists advocate teaching students to use structured heuristic procedures-conscious, deliberate search strategies such as Burke's Pentad or Young, Becker and Pike's tagmemic questions. According to these specialists, such help students to explore problems for seminal elements of a solution (Janice Lauer). 1 They enhance students' interpretive powers (Mike Rose).2 They focus attention, guide reason, stimulate memory and encourage intuition (Richard Young).3 More than that, they help students to generate content. Used in different combinations, they can yield abundant raw material (Erika Lindemann),4 help students to dredge up ideas from their subconscious (William Irmscher),5 help students to explore systematically everything they know about a (Linda Flower),6 and provide insights and ideas for any subject (Laurie Kirszner and Stephen Mandel).7 Although I find such claims interesting, I suspect that they are too optimistic and suggest to students oversimplified approaches to heuristic thinking in general. Teachers often qualify the advice they give students, yet their qualifications tend to become lost in their enthusiasm for structured heuristic procedures. Flower suggests that although such are only high probability ways to proceed, for problems like writing, heuristics are the most dependable and most creative way to go.18 Similarly, Young emphasizes that even though deliberate heuristic search is not infallible, it makes data gathering more efficient and increases the likelihood that the account be adequate. 9 Winterowd suggests that although all may not be useful, students should try to understand all of the procedures he recommends so that the will become part of [their] equipment for thinking.10 And Beth Neman tells teachers in her methods text, If care is not exercised, the complex means [of structured heuristic search] can sometimes assume an importance far beyond-even incongruous with-the simple end of a wellwritten paper,11 but she simplifies the problem in her textbook for students,

Burke's Act in A Rhetoric of Motives

In his critical writing Kenneth Burke approaches texts as for dealing with situations.I In terms of his dramatistic pentad, each text may be seen as an or strategy which responds to a given scene or situation (GM, p. xv). His approach that a [text's] structure is to be described most accurately by thinking always of the [text's] function. It assumes that the [text] is designed to 'do something' for the [writer] and his readers, and that we can make the most relevant observations about its design by considering the [text] as the embodiment of this act (PLF, p. 89). But Burke's own texts have rarely been approached with Burke's critical methods. Few have been seen as strategies that respond to particular historical-cultural situations. Yet is is clear from Counterstatement (1931) through Language as Symbolic Action (1966) that Burke's texts name and strategically respond to particular historical-cultural situations. In A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) the situation so named is one dominated by language and thought which privilege the economic forces of production (RM, p. 290) and the scientific ideals of an 'impersonal' terminology (RM, p. 32). Burke's pentad clusters these emphases in modern thought and language under the term scene; that is, all favor motivational explanations based in the scene. Thus in A Rhetoric of Motives the scene Burke addresses, the situation he names, is one which emphasizes the scenic. Burke's strategic response to this situation is to restore an emphasis on act: substance, in the old philosophy, was an act; and a way of life is an acting together (RM, p. 21). In A Rhetoric of Motives Burke aims to change the reader's central emphasis from scene to act. Yet, while intending this emphasis, Burke in his writing is also aware of a tendency to slight the term, act, in the very featuring of it. For we may even favor it enough to select it as our point of departure (point of departure in the sense of an ancestral term from which all the others are derived, sharing its quality 'substantially'); but by the same token it may come to be a point of departure in the sense of the term that is 'left behind' (GM, p. 65). Burke acknowledges the difficulty of writing against his times-against the prevailing

Using the Burkeian pentad in the education of the basic speech student

Kenneth Burke's pentad has served as the basis for numerous research projects in the speech communication field over the last thirty years. The pentad, however, has received scant notice in the basic speech course. It is this paper's contention that through pentadic studies, the basic course student can benefit in two ways: (1) by gaining a stronger theoretical base for the understanding of communication; (2) by acquiring a more thorough knowledge of speech criticism.

Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis by Janet Brown (review)

Book Reviews JANET BROWN. Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press 1979. Pp. 167. Janet Brown, Director of Theatre in the Communication Arts Department at the University of Hartford, has published the first book-length study of contemporary feminist drama. Although the second wave of the feminist movement in America has been building for almost two decades, feminist plays have not exactly been dominating the American stage. Rather than surveying plays by playwrights who call themselves feminists, Brown offers a definition of feminist drama drawn from the writings of feminist theorists and literary critics. She uses a rather narrow critical method and applies her theory to five feminist theatre groups in order to determine to what extent theatre is, has been, and can be a rhetorical device for feminism. According to Brown, feminist drama takes "woman's suuggle for autonomy against an oppressive, sexist society" as its central rhetorical motive. Brown uses Kenneth Burke's theory which states that "a rhetorical or persuasive motive inspires the symbolic act which is literature" as outlined in The Philosophy oj Literary Form. Following Burke, Brown searches for "associational clusters," both in plays purporting to be feminist and in those which seem feminist to her, which reveal a pattern of symbolic action and consequently the play's rhetorical motive. Brown recognizes the work ofother feministcritics such as Kate Millett, Ellen Moers, and Suzanne Juhasz, as well as that of theorists on the nature of women's oppression such as Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly. From the theorists Brown extracts the ideas that women's powerlessness is reflected in "the portrayal of the unjust soc io~sexual hierarchy" and that women are not portrayed as autonomous because they are perceived as objects and only in relation to men. The uniqueness of Brown's approach is its assumption that all dramatic art functions rhetorically and that the rhetorical motive (in this case the feminist impulse) of a play is implicit in its pattern ofsymbolic action regardless of whether the playwright in question professes any particular philosophical or political feminist position. Brown chooses from Burke's pentad (scene, agent, agency, purpose, act) the elements agent and scene to determine whether a play is feminist. The agentscene ratio detennines the quality of Book Reviews 103 feminism. Brown states: "If the agent is a woman, her purpose autonomy. and the scene an unjust socia-sexual hierarchy , the play is a feminist drama," Employing Burke's theory, Brown demonstrates that Tina Howe's Birth and Afterbirth (published in an ostensibly feminist collection, The New Women's Theatre, edited by Honor Moore) does not meet the criteria for feminist drama, because it does not show a female agent slTUggling for autonomy. On the contrary, a rather stifled, low-status housewife and mother oppressed by her obnoxious and overpowering four-year-old son (to be played by an adult actor) strives to convince a happy and professionally successful acquaintance whom she envies and despises to abandon her career for the throes of motherhood. Despite its male authorship, III the Boom Boom Room by David Rabe qualifies as feminist drama, according to the theory , because it portrays go-go dancer Chrissy struggling against oppression by her father, husband, and the male voyeurs for whom she perfonns. Even though Chrissy finds herself becoming more sexually exploited and more objectified toward the play'sconclusion than at the opening, the drama portrays her battle against the menacing socio-sexual hierarchy , whkh succeeds in defeating her only physically and economically but not emotionally. Rosalyn Drexler's The Bed Was Full, the least realistic and most farcical of the plays treated, succeeds as feminist drama, according to Brown, since it effectively portrays woman's oppression as sexual toy and emphasizes scene rather than agent by satirizing the socio-sexual hierarchy through dramatization of nonsensical stereotypes of women in relation to men. Since mistress/victim/artist's model Kali cannot establish her autonomy , the play offers a stunted level of feminism. Of the plays by single well-known authors which portray a lone female agent, Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress presents the clearest rhetorical statement of feminism. Agent Tommy asserts her own...

A pentadic analysis of ideologies in two gay rights controversies

The application of Kenneth Burke's pentad in rhetorical criticism can reveal ideologies at work in a controversy. This paper is an example of how to use the pentad to understand ideology. Rhetoric in favor of gay rights is informed by an ideology that features agents as primary and acts as derivative. Rhetoric opposed to gay rights features acts as primary and agents as derivative.

Kenneth Burke andthe Mod DonnaThe dramatistic method applied to feminist criticism

This essay employ's Burke's pentad and pattern of symbolic action and a definition of feminism proposed by Aileen S. Kraditor to posit a definition of feminist drama. An analysis of the Mod Donna by Myrna Lamb illustrates the critical use of this definition.

Classroom Heuristics and Empiricism

WRITING TEACHER'S ADVICE to students searching for material has generally included two elements: an ascesis, to render the student well-disposed in his or her search, and a set of questions to generate information. Conventionally, both the ascesis and the set of questions have been primitive. The student was occasionally instructed to find a topic that was interesting to him or her (as if that weren't half the problem), look in his or her heart, and write, but more often, urged to compose a thesis sentence and make good use of the research tools in the university library. XVith the revival of the study of rhetoric, the concept of invention has been treated more systematically: associational exercises, rules of thumb for developing material, and systematic procedures of inquiry, under the topic of pre-writing, form a healthy chunk of most writing textbooks. Further, students are often taught a systematic procedure for uncovering new information, a procedure that encourages a certain attitude of inquiry in the student: Burke's pentad, Aristotelean topics-or some abbreviation of them-, or the discovery procedures of the Michigan tagmemicists. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze some popular heuristic forms, with a view to establishing their continuity with the dominating tradition of Anglo-American empiricism and its associated mental stance of contemplativeness. Let us first survey the terrain. One striking feature of modern invention procedures is the separation and hypertrophy of the basic elements. Macrorie, for example, concentrates on ascesis: the student's search for his own voice is a sort of initiation to mature writing, attained through the disciplines of the journal, peer evaluation, and unrelenting honesty. This ascesis, of course, implies a set of questions: How did it feel? and How, exactly did it effect you, visually, sensually? These questions, in fact, appear in Telling Writing, where they constitute the forinstance, the realized image which is the mark of good writing.1 Conversely, the hypertrophied set of questions in the tagmemic matrix, which asks students to analyze events as waves, particles, and fields and in terms of contrast, variation, and distribution, is also an ascesis intended to encourage the formation of working hypotheses.2

The interest value of rhetorical strategies derived from Kenneth Burke's pentad

The interest value of rhetorical strategies derived from Kenneth Burke's pentad