To explore understandings of corruption in Colombia, we analyzed public talk on Hora 20 , a very popular Colombian radio program. Using Burke’s concept of terministic screens and his method of cluster analysis, we found that Hora 20’s radio speakers express six terministic screens regarding corruption. Each cluster triggers different programs of action with diverse linguistic and practical implications, both for addressing problems of corruption in Colombia and for complicating Burke’s cluster analysis method.

This paper puts the spotlight on the work of Dutch Poet Laureate Ramsey Nasr. In the four years of his official appointment, he wrote poems and essays articulating a critical perspective on the current political conjuncture in the Netherlands. The Poet Laureate can be considered a public intellectual in that he shows engagement in regard to concrete societal issues and ‘translates’ this into poetry. Using ideas and rhetorical tools from the work of Kenneth Burke, I will show how Nasr’s poetry prompts readers to identify with his perspective while illuminating how such identification leads to division from a perspective that frames nationalism in terms that would exclude multiethnic citizenship.

Whoever raises questions about the legibility of the city must notice that the metaphor of legibility involves the ideas of interpreting signs and symbols under different motivational accesses, which leads to the creation of different scopes of reading, understanding and acting. Thus, the legibility of the city involves the idea of a rhetoric of the city. Kevin lynch is one of the most important theorists of the legibility of the city and his ground-breaking work The Image of the City is first of all on questions concerning the influence of architectural clues and city form on the degree a city becomes legible. Therefore, he emphasizes the important role of three major terms: identity, structure and meaning. But, while his inquiry stresses identity and structure, he says almost nothing about meaning. Since Lynch has no background in theories of meaning, his work leaves a desideratum. It seems to be obvious that leaving out questions of meaning won’t lead to any kind of legibility of the city, as long as the metaphor of legibility is taken seriously. To fill this gap Lynch’s work has to be grounded on a theory of meaning which is able to explain how form influences attributions of meaning, creates scopes of understanding and, finally, affects questions of appropriate behavior. This theoretical background is given by Kenneth Burke. The thesis of this paper is that Burke describes the relation of form, situation and action by the help of what I will call the motive-circle and that this motive-circle is able to explain the above mentioned advisements. Thus, the aim of this paper is to show the rhetorical dimension of the creation of an image of the city. Since—for Lynch—our processes of orientation are based on our image of the city, the main thesis of this paper is that processes of spatial orientation have a rhetorical dimension.

In the face of what information design theorist Richard Wurman has dubbed "information anxiety," it is well documented that information visualization has become a widely accepted tool to assist with the navigation of the symbolic world. Information visualisations, or infographics, are essentially external cognitive aids such as graphs, diagrams, maps and other interactive and innovative graphic applications. It is often argued by design theorists that information visualisations are rhetorical texts in that they have the ability to persuade. Thus, it is not a leap to assert that information visualization may be understood as one expression of Kenneth Burke’s notion of the ‘terministic screen.’

In 1968 the Milwaukee Fourteen, members of the Catholic Anti-Vietnam War Movement, removed approximately ten-thousand draft files from a Selective Service Office and burned them with home-made napalm in a nearby park before awaiting arrest. Employing the Burkean concepts of categorical guilt, mortification and transvaluation as a framework from which to analyze the Milwaukee Fourteen’s “statement” and the resistive act itself, this essay troubles the general understanding of mortification as simply extirpating one’s guilt by self-victimage. Rather the Milwaukee Fourteen mortify themselves for the disordered transgressions of a culture. Their sacrificial purification results in a form of hybrid victimage with the ultimate goal of transvaluing the moral order of the Vietnam War era.

In 1968 the Milwaukee Fourteen, members of the Catholic Anti-Vietnam War Movement, removed approximately ten-thousand draft files from a Selective Service Office and burned them with home-made napalm in a nearby park before awaiting arrest. Employing the Burkean concepts of categorical guilt, mortification and transvaluation as a framework from which to analyze the Milwaukee Fourteen’s “statement” and the resistive act itself, this essay troubles the general understanding of mortification as simply extirpating one’s guilt by self-victimage. Rather the Milwaukee Fourteen mortify themselves for the disordered transgressions of a culture. Their sacrificial purification results in a form of hybrid victimage with the ultimate goal of transvaluing the moral order of the Vietnam War era.

The purpose of this project is to conceptualize, theorize and provide a representative anecdote of rhetorical ingenuity as it has surfaced in the contemporary history of the anti-sweatshop movement. Rhetorical ingenuity is a term derived from the work of Kenneth Burke (1969) based on the combination of imagination and inventiveness. The anti-sweatshop movement, part of the new global realities (Ingram, 2002), calls for more imaginative tactics and strategies. Special attention is paid to the proposition of and development of counter-organizations as forms of rhetorical ingenuity. Two parallel situations are compared where a traditional social movement tactic (i.e., the hunger strike) ushers in the example of rhetorical ingenuity through the development of new counter-organizations (i.e., the WRC and later the DSP), occurring in 2000 and the other in 2006. The purpose of rhetorical ingenuity to add to social moment theory is discussed in light of previous contributions. Finally, exploring the success of rhetorical ingenuity in social movements is considered for future research.

In 2003, writer and cultural critic Bill Wasik stunned the world with his newest experiment, the MOB Project, which flooded the streets of New York City with strange performances quickly labeled “flash mobs” by participants and local media. With the goal of understanding the communicative purpose and function of these new performance events, this project analyzes the eight original flash mobs of 2003 through the use of Kenneth Burke’s Pentad. Specifically, this essay explores the agent, agency, and scene of the flash mob, arguing that the scene was the dominant pentadic feature of Wasik’s act (the Flash Mob). Additionally, this paper examines the specific social, cultural and political influences of the flash mob and its participants with a particular emphasis on technology and the hipster subculture.

The following feature draws a parallel between the “Burkean parlor” and the social networking site, Facebook. It also applies the Burkean pentad to the principle of motive behind Facebook users. In addition, it details several different types of Facebook pages and the growth patterns of each regarding purpose.

In a letter of April, 1989, Kenneth Burke suggested that the process of writing A Grammar of Motives contributed significantly to the choice of identification as key term for A Rhetoric of Motives. Burke proposed two representative anecdotes for the study of the composing process of the Rhetoric: The story of the shepherd that appears in the Rhetoric and the story of some children who are born without the capacity to feel pain from the external world. If we follow out these leads, using the methodology of the Grammar to look at the work of writing the Rhetoric, Burke says that we will see how identification emerged as a “positive negative,” a program for negative thinking. We might also learn more about connections between the Grammar and the Rhetoric.

The interview provides a look at Burke in his twilight years as well as something of the sound of his eloquent but halting talk in that period.  Burke's ideas in the transcriptions offer insights about his method and philosophy that could prove helpful to scholars but would also make a useful introduction to Burke as a philosopher of language.  They also tell the story of humorous profound American thinker still vigorous in a green old age.

This paper gives a brief overview of the redemption drama as found in the work of rhetorician Kenneth Burke and applies this drama to the poem “Dear John” by Tony Hoagland. The poem is examined through the Burkeian lens, with special attention to the elements of the redemption drama, while also highlighting the use of humor as an effective rhetorical strategy.

Kenneth Burke’s sociological criticism of literature as “equipment for living” situates the work of art as a response to a situation that is essentially social; literature serves a therapeutic role insofar as it diagnoses and dissolves maladaptive social categories and orientations. Burke’s complementary notion of “perspective by incongruity” describes the way in which artists push a system of belief or interpretive scheme to its limits by deliberating creating effects which escape its means of formalization. In the work of Gilles Deleuze, we encounter similarly the artist of literature and discourse who assumes the role of a physician of culture and seeks to produce new possibilities for life by multiplying available perspectives for action. In judging whether the rhetorical appeals and interpretive schemes they offer are medicine or poison, our criteria shall be whether they constrain, narrow, or otherwise limit life (gridlock), or whether they provide new possibilities, experiences, and configurations of knowledge for living (counter-gridlock). Through the incongruous imbrications of Burke and Deleuze, we discover a resonant pragmatism in which art, literature, and ethics become something more than tools for refining the ways in which we currently experience the world. Rather, they offer means for a way out of the orientations which configure and constrain our capacity to actualize potentials for a better tomorrow.

In Kenneth Burke's Language as Symbolic Action , it is suggested that communities build internal cohesion by negating portions of their constituencies in rituals of purification.  Over the past thirty years these dynamics have been evidenced in the role that eating disorders have played in the development of contemporary feminist consciousness.    While key feminist authors have been framing these conditions for the larger public, the manner in which anorexia and bulimia have been projected through these writings has become increasingly problematic.

This paper clarifies Burke's ideas on education in his 1955 essay entitled "Lingusitic Approach to Problems of Education" and relates it to the context and circumstances to which Burke was responding at the time of that essay.  The papers shows Burke's writing as an expression of his characteristic position as a thinker, that is as a responsive dialogist who used it as a tool of invention.  Using archival materials from the Kenneth Benne papers at the University of Vermont, the paper tells the story of Burke’s essay and his relation to the key ideas in educational theories at the mid-point of the 20th century.

I argue that a sub-area of Burkean criticism should be developed using Burke’s constitutional dialectic to examine constitutions as the primary objects of study. To demonstrate the possibilities of this strain of criticism, I use Burke’s constitutional dialectic to examine the draft constitution for an Islamic state urged by the worldwide movement Hizb ut-Tahrir. In that document, internal conflicts and differences, not to mention challenges coming from ideologically incorrect states, are anticipated and woven into a comprehensive plan offering Islamic answers to citizens’ problems and to the problem of the state’s place and purpose. I argue that the draft constitution is a systematic strategic act of totalizing comprehensiveness that trades agency for order, with troubling consequences.

EXISTENTIALIST LITERATURE is often referred to as a function of absurdity, alienation and nihilistic despair since the works of this genre are inhabited by unsavory protagonists and gloomy subject matter. The idea of existential dread often dominates our understanding of existentialism, and this is not only unfortunate, but terribly flawed. It is as if the decision to pick up and leaf through any novel by Franz Kafka or Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea , Albert Camus’ The Stranger or Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting For Godot , is not just an exercise in leisurely entertainment, but a statement about how one is feeling—and that feeling might be summed up, in the popular imagination, as meaninglessness. Viewed through a Burkean lens, however, one may re-consider existentialist literature as rhetorical acts that provoke the ontological difficulties with which persons negotiate their social environment equipped with only the resources of symbolic action. Instead of viewing this genre as advancing the desolate egoism of individual consciousnesses, applying the Burkean Parlor described in The Philosophy of Literary Form and Burke’s notion of the representative anecdote re-figure these works of fiction as animating a particular orientation and worldview—the point of which is to create a vocabulary that reflects, selects and deflects reality ( Grammar of Motives 59). Burke’s method of literary analysis suggests that literature should be organized “with reference to strategies ” in “active categories” ( Philosophy 303). By adopting Burke’s methodology to analyze existentialist literature, I’d like to move away from the popular reception of the genre and reveal its preoccupation with the ontological struggle of communication which fits squarely within Burke’s dramatistic notion of symbolic action. These works of fiction should not be evaluated aesthetically but as rhetorical acts whose purpose is to intensify the exigencies that arise in human interaction. In this essay I conceptualize the Burkean parlor as a representative anecdote for existentialism and then analyze two works of existentialist literature through a Burkean lens: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground . I’ve chosen these two works because Beckett and Dostoevsky did not write philosophical essays explicating existentialism to accompany their fiction—like Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre—but instead sought to articulate the ontological tensions of symbolic action through the presentation of dramatic situations in literary form.

KENNETH BURKE IS undisputedly one of the most influential figures in the last century of rhetorical studies. His vast textual corpus has over time established the very bedrock and lexicon upon which much of the discipline has been built. Despite his death and the decades that have passed since his last major publications, Burke remains today a widely well regarded cultural critic and rhetorical theorist. The plainest evidence of Burke’s lasting influence in rhetorical studies is the rate at which he continues to be cited; between the 1970s and 1980s, the number of articles citing Burke nearly quadrupled (from 119 to 400), and this rate has continued to steadily increase since then (Rountree “By the Numbers”). For example, since 2008, far more articles have been published about or using Burke in Rhetoric Society Quarterly than any other rhetorical theorist or figure. 1 Burke is also the only rhetorical theorist to have his own journal. 2 I mention these data only to highlight Burke’s continued and lasting significance for rhetorical scholarship.

Scholarship addressing Burke’s ideas about acceptance and rejection frames is commonplace in modern academia. Often lost in the discussion, however, is the sheer power of Burke’s description of the comic frame. Using the first season of the American television program The Office as its object, this essay hopes to explore the implications of Burke’s vision of the comic for the modern, white-collar, corporate work environment. In highlighting Burke’s notion of comedy as essentially humane, it attempts to demonstrate, through The Office , the importance of this underlying attitude with regard to public discussion, debate, and critique. The essay highlights the tension between corporate tedium and financial necessity and grapples with the consequences of acceptance and rejection frames. It seeks to place to the attitude behind Burke’s notion of the comic at the forefront of public debate and offer a specific example of the relevance and power that such an attitude can possess.

IS KENNETH BURKE'S pentad actually a hexad? The answer is complicated. In the original edition of A Grammar of Motives , Burke discusses just five terms—act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose—as part of his dramatistic vocabulary for discerning human motivation. In fact, Burke likens these terms to five fingers on a hand (xxii; “The Study of Symbolic Action” 13-14). When elaborating the interrelationships of these concepts, Burke explores a separate term—“attitude”—that refers to one’s disposition to respond in a particular way to his or her circumstances. However, he classes attitude under either act, agent, or agency, rather than as a separate sixth term. Attitude, he says in Grammar , may be “the preparation for an act, which would make it a kind of symbolic act, or incipient act.” 3 As it may also be a “state of mind ,” attitude may “be classed under the head of agent ” ( Grammar 20). Additionally, Burke occasionally refers to attitude as a variation of agency ( Grammar 443; “Counter-Gridlock” 367; Attitudes 394; “Questions and Answers” 332). He reinforces his preference for a pentad in at least two other works. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , he calls the pentad “incipiently a hexad” (446). In Dramatism and Development , he expresses some regret that he "had not turned the pentad into a hexad, with attitude as the sixth term. However, the Grammar contains a chapter that implicitly performs this very function. It is entitled ‘Incipient’ and ‘Delayed’ Action” (23). Despite these assertions, Burke's "hand" sprouts a sixth digit. In the 1969 edition of Grammar , he states, “I have sometimes added the term ‘attitude’ to the…five major terms” (443), thereby making the pentad a hexad. In 1984, he admits that, had his view of attitude been “clear” years ago, the “Pentad would have been a Hexad from the start” ( Attitudes 393-394). Burke’s oscillation has undoubtedly contributed to differing views of the hexad. For example, Trevor Melia embraces six terms, pointing out that attitude “was implicit in the pentad from the beginning” and maintaining further that, “were Burke writing the Grammar today [in 1989], he would treat the pentad as a hexad” (72, note 21). However, other scholars—among them Dana Anderson, Debra Hawhee, and Cheryl Tatano Beck—have performed significant scholarship highlighting attitude while working with only five terms, with attitudinal considerations being adequately included under act, agent, or agency.

In 1984 Kenneth Burke particpated in a panel discussion over the nature of dramatism, insisting that it was literally descriptive of human symbol-using, while some leading Burkeans on the panel insisted that dramatism was metaphorical. This essay revisits that controversy and argues that Burke consistently maintained that dramatism provides a universal heuristic of human motives.

Judge Roy Moore brought both condemnation and praise for his attempts to keep his Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama state courthouse building. This study examines the responses to Moore in light of Kenneth Burke’s poetic frames to suggest the existence and impact of simultaneous and contradictory frames. The frames of epic, comic, and burlesque are traced, and implications thereof for Moore’s situation and for Burkean frames.

THE ACADEMY (AND OUR DISCIPLINE) has a love for grand figures. Any type of work with social movements is often seen through and discussed in terms of leaders who are easy to identify, and therefore, easily work as metonymic figureheads for their respective organizations. The speaker in this situation becomes the embodiment of the social movement, and s/he (and the organization s/he represents) is judged by hir ability to speak in accordance with the classic concepts of oratorical performance. Inevitably, this model conjures up images of a leader crafting an oration for public consumption in an offstage space; some text carefully crafted by the individual speaker working alone until the appropriate time of its release. It is easy to imagine all rhetoric, and especially unorthodox or polemic rhetorics, working in this way since it is comforting—it allows rhetoricians to make the unfamiliar familiar by pressing unusual or discomforting rhetorics into a Quintilian-like model of public performance.

We employ a Burkean perspective to examine the role of rhetoric in the sport of NASCAR.  In particular, we explore the role that driver rhetoric plays in the mainstream success of the sport.  We selected six representative television interviews by NASCAR drivers and subjected them to a pentadic analysis.  For comparison purposes, we perform the same analysis on two interviews from each of three other major American professional sports – football, basketball, and baseball.  Our findings suggest that rhetorical norms in NASCAR do differ from those norms of other major American sports, and that this distinction could possibly play a role in the marketing success of NASCAR.

Kenneth Burke was no stranger to psychoanalysis. In fact, Freud had a major influence on his theory of dramatism. For example, in Rhetoric and Religion , he credited Freud for “great contributions” and called him a “genius” (Burke, 1970, p. 265) In Language as Symbolic Action , he noted that Freud had “done well” (Burke, 1966, p. 66). And in his most lengthy praise of Freud, he wrote:

Many scholars are only familiar with the version of “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” reprinted in The Philosophy of Literary Form ; the rich history of Kenneth Burke’s essay has been neglected.  “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” was situated in a particular historical context that deserves scholarly attention.  Burke formulated his analysis of Hitler’s book as a response to contemporary reviews of the unexpurgated translation of Mein Kampf , and he presented his essay before the Third American Writers’ Congress during the peak of a critical debate about fascist rhetoric.  By understanding the influence of contextual factors on Burke’s essay, scholars will have a fuller account of one of his most acclaimed works.

WILLIAM PHILLIPS, LONG-STANDING EDITOR OF THE PARTISAN REVIEW , recalled marching in a May Day parade in New York City during the thirties with Kenneth Burke at his side. According to Phillips, Burke joined in the shout: “We write for the working class.” 1 Perhaps Burke had subordinated his own literary ego to that encompassing solidarity of the group, for it is hard to imagine that, speaking for himself, he was being true to the situation. Anyone who has delved seriously into “boikswoiks” knows that, although tremendously rewarding, they are dense, idiosyncratic, and metacritically challenging.

This paper discusses an alternative way to look at the epigram from Burke’s Grammar of Motives and proposes to interpret it under the light of his own theorization of Dramatism and cathartic use of symbolic action. The paper draws a linguistic connection between the terms “war and “beauty” treating them as interchangeable double metaphors. Burke’s awareness of this was adumbrated in his own writings and in the manuscript of the Symbolic .

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring drew on the familiar resources of cultural pastoral attitudes of a natural order, and redrew the boundary of the natural order at an ecological self that needed to be protected from contamination. In the world of Silent Spring, a Citizen Housewife shared her substance with the natural order, had the legitimacy of rights and knowledge, and she exercised political agency. This identity resonated in political and social life, and created an identification for social action. In this paper, I trace the adoption and use of a Citizen Housewife identity in the environmental justice movement over time. First published in 1962, Silent Spring was an attack on the large scale use of pesticides and herbicides. Pesticides had been used without due regard for their interrelated effects on natural ecosystems and human health. Building on a clear and involving introduction to ecology and natural systems, Silent Spring shows how the supposedly safe use of pesticides and herbicides causes harm at every level of organization of life, from the cell to the ecosystem. The war on insects is a war against our own bodies.

Attitudes toward the pecuniary are peculiar. One reason we misunderstand money is because it defines and answers to both our animal nature (necessity) and our symbolic nature (property). In this paper I trace the genealogy of Kenneth Burke’s attitudes toward money in the “Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven” to show how Burke’s logological approach toward money is original and in tension with claims offered by competing, economic attitudes toward money. Money sits forever at the nexus of our animal and symbolic nature because it simultaneously holds the place of value and signifies what we value. By stressing animal limits and symbolic infinity, Burke invites us to ponder the extent of human cooperation and the boundaries of human strivings. As attitudes, these invitations reveal that Burke wanted to re-appropriate the money symbol to the realm of logology and religion – away from capitalism – to exhibit the potential justice at the heart of human experience. That justice, however, only inheres so long as the tension between animal and symbol is respected in our pursuit of needs through symbolic action. Burke strings the tension between animal and symbol along the lines of a conversation between The Lord and Satan. Along the way he shows us a Lord sympathetic to our money crimes as well as all others and a loyal opposition that laughs at our infirmities. In this way Burke works to redeem human commerce from its worst propensities by showing its relationship to the Word.

Much has been written about Burke’s famous dictum that literature is equipment for living. Many writers have assumed that he meant that all literature (high, low and experimental) performed a salubrious role for its audiences. With great daring Carlnita Greene and Christopher Greene argue that some art may be dysfunctional for its audiences, foreclosing solutions, propagandizing and narrowing rather than opening the universe of discourse.

The German Philosopher Hans Blumenberg causes vehement disputes among German scholars. To some, he is a rhetoric scholar, to others he is not. As a result of the disagreements on Blumenberg’s categorization, a new rhetoric approach has been created: Rhetorische Anthropologie, Rhetorical Anthropology. In fact, Blumenberg should be considered a New Rhetoric advocate. In order to prove this hypothesis, this article provides a comparison of Blumenberg and an indisputable New Rhetoric advocate: Kenneth Burke. The significant parallels between Blumenberg and Burke will clear up the German dispute, allude to some underlying problems within the discipline in Europe, and recast Rhetorical Anthropology from its status as a unique cast of rhetorical ideas.

IN CAMILLE K. LEWIS' RECENT ARTICLE, “Publish and Perish?: My Fundamentalist Education from the Inside Out,” Lewis makes public the intended final chapter of her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism. 1 Introducing the chapter, Lewis recounts the conflict she experienced with Bob Jones University (BJU) over the chapter’s content, a struggle that eventually led to her resignation from the school in 2007. Lewis acknowledges that along her journey she has become more prophetic and less sagacious, a move readily apparent when one compares chapter six with the first five chapters. Yet Lewis’ goal is neither simply to expose nor to rant but to imagine “a productive criticism for sectarian rhetoric and religion.” 2 In short, Lewis fears that Jim Berg, dean of students at BJU, represents a recent trend toward a rhetorically tragic frame, and she puts forward instead the more comedic frame offered by Walter Wink and Jim Wallis. Lewis’ goal is certainly admirable, but at the end of the day her criticism is not as productive as it could be. Her most recent rhetoric is, from one perspective, captivating, but it is not Burkean enough, because it is not romantic enough, to use her own frame.