Abstract
This essay examines the thirty-year career arc of professional wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts by employing a Burkean approach to understanding Roberts’s symbolically resonate performances of mortification . Through performances of mortification both during and following his active wrestling career, Roberts is transformed into a purifying agent for wrestling fans’ collective guilt over systemic “demons” of addiction and human frailty that have haunted professional wrestling and its fandom increasingly since the 1990s.
- Journal
- KB Journal: The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society
- Published
- 2021-04
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