Cody Hunter, University of Nevada, Reno Abstract This essay examines contemporary arguments for nuclear weapons rearmament and disarmament by theorizing generating and generative principles in terms of principles of use and principles of existence through Kenneth Burke’s temporizing of essence. The essay concludes with an audio/visual experiment that invites audiences to reconsider the generating principles implicit in their nuclear terms. I worry about our corrupt newspapers, about nucleonics (for where there is power there is intrigue, so this new fantastic power may be expected to call forth intrigue equally fantastic).—Kenneth Burke in a letter to William Carlos Williams, Oct. 12, 1945, Pennsylvania State University Special Collections The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists made history in 2020 by announcing that the Doomsday Clock had been set to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since its inception. The Bulletin was organized by several Manhattan Project scientists in response to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Doomsday Clock was added to the cover in 1947 (Lerner) as “a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making” (“Doomsday Clock”). At the time of writing this, in the year 2021, the Doomsday Clock remains at 100 seconds to midnight in no small part due to the continued threat of nuclear annihilation that inspired its creation in the first place (ibid). To better understand the present threat of nuclear catastrophe, this essay tracks several lines of argument both for and against nuclear disarmament to theorize the implicit generating principles that are terminologically foundational for each position. Drawing primarily from Kenneth Burke’s articulations of generative and generating principles, I outline two principles that generate terms for this debate: The principle of use and the principle of existence . These two principles are not mutually exclusive,…

This special issue of KB Journal is the second of two issues that offer a compilation of papers presented at the conference Rhetoric as Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke, Culture and Education, which was held in May 2013 at Ghent University, Belgium. In part II of the special issue we will continue with a more theoretical examination of Burke's international legacy, by giving a stage to scholars who confront Burke's ideas with the work of European thinkers such as François Lyotard, Chaim Perelman and Augustine but also non-western thinkers such as the Ehtiopean scholar Maimire Mennsasemay. Other contributions in this issue confront the work of Burke with more contemporary theoretical perspectives.

This essay presents an initial response to the challenge that scholars begin to flesh-out the possibilities for a Dramatistic ethics. In turn we consider the status of ethics after the poststructural and linguistic turns and explore the potential in Burke's work as a response to the impasse that these turns have created for ethics. Next, we argue that a Dramatistic ethics begin as a mode of inquiry and advance pentadic analysis as a holistic framework for continuing ethical scholarship. Last, we provide a synoptic pentadic analysis of five ethical theories as suggestive points of critical entry.

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.

Increasingly, rhetoricians are taking notice of the intertwining of “serious” discourse with comedy, humor and satire. Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, for example, includes an array of articles that recognize the “discursive integration” (Baym 2005) of news and politics with comic entertainment. Rather than seeing this integration as a degradation of news into infotainment, Baym sees it as a creative response to the need to make important information competitively appealing in the “televisual sphere” of a post-modern consumer economy. But does the framing of journalism and politics as humor or clowning leave room for the possibility of serious, constructive action?

In 2007 US Senator Larry Craig plead guilty to soliciting sex in an airport men’s room, a notable irony as he has a consistent record of voting against gay-rights. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart sought to punish Craig for homophobia by hoisting him with his own homophobic petard, using homosexuality as a punch line. Turning to Burke to untangle this rhetorical knot, we see The Daily Show providing a grotesque response to Craig’s troubles. As a transitional frame, the grotesque has received relatively little scholarly attention, due in part to the fact that this particular response to social and political strife does little to resolve the conflict at hand. As analysis shows, by punishing Craig as a grotesque figure while using a strategy of prejudice he, himself, would employ (i.e., homophobia) the social and political struggle over gay-rights becomes mired in cynical mud rather than providing either defense for homosexual acceptance or potential for Craig’s personal redemption. By contrast, we can see that a comic response focusing on Craig’s seeming repressed homoerotic desire would redeem Craig as lost, not hopeless, and gay rights as a logical course.

In November 2004, [adult swim] previewed an animated show about a family of quasi-anthropomorphic, endangered land squids living in the Appalachian region of northern Georgia. This show, Squidbillies , is typical in its portrayal of the Cuyler family as an impoverished, uneducated and fiercely xenophobic family of hillbillies reminiscent of other Hollywood representations of the Appalachian region. Although on its surface the show appears to be yet another satire about hillbillies and rednecks, further investigation into the show’s narrative reveals an emergent concept of otherness in how the writers portray non-Appalachian groups, specifically suburban whites (referred to as “yogurt lovin’ ‘Chalkies’”). In these depictions, the writers use satire to express a sense of self-depreciating humor toward their own culture. This paper examines the concept of otherness emergent in Squidbillies , specifically focusing on how the priming of the hillbilly stereotype is used as a literary device to introduce and comment on Chalkie culture.

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.

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.