The Rhetoric of

Kenneth Burke

Definition of Human

  1. Symbol-making, symbol-using, symbol-misusing animals
  2. Inventors of the negative
  3. Separated from natural surroundings by tools of our own making
  4. Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy
  5. Aware of our own mortality
  6. Rotten with perfection

Identification/Consubstantiality

  1. Pragmatic (in service to a cause)
  2. Unification against others (antithesis)
  3. Unconscious & Implicit (essential)

Identification + Desire

  1. Narrative Form--the Creation and Satisfaction of Expectations
  2. Arouse and Gratify Needs
  3. Three kinds of form:
    • Conventional
    • Repetitive
    • Progressive
      • Syllogistic
      • Qualitative

Persuasion Requires:

  1. Freedom or Choice
  2. Purpose or Will
  3. Motion or Movement

The Pentad

  1. Act
  2. Agent
  3. Agency
  4. Scene
  5. Purpose

Interrelationships are motives/situation

Perspective by Incongruity

  • Relies on the idea of the negative
  • Bergson & Nietzsche together
  • Metaphor logic
  • A way out of terministic screens, occupational psychoses, and trained incapacities

Implications of the Negative:

Morality, Hierarchies, & Perfection

  • The "no" gives rise to "thou-shalt-nots" and "don'ts"
  • Caste/rank/socioeconomic classes,
    • divisions are inevitable and motivating
  • Entelechy or Telos: Drives humans toward "perfection"
    • Including collective self-destruction
  • Mystery both divides us and reduces differences

Guilt, Purification, & Redemption Cycle

  • Guilt requires relief or purge
  • Rebirth can happen through:
  1. Scapegoating
    • Creates victims and perpetrators
    • Unification against shared enemy
  2. Mortification
    • Self-inflicted blame/punishment
    • Suffering induces transcenence

Problems caused by Purification Cycle

  • Victim mentality
  • Scapegoating--Holocaust
  • Mortification--Blaming individuals, seeing social problems as individual problems
    • poverty, addiction, obesity, mental illness, racism, etc.

Kenneth Burke

By Heather Lee Branstetter

Made with Slides.com

Kenneth Burke

Based in part on Foss/Foss/Trapp Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric Reading

  • 361

More from Heather Lee Branstetter