Heather Lee Branstetter
professor of rhetoric, writing, and digital composition
The Rhetoric of
Kenneth Burke
Definition of Human
- Symbol-making, symbol-using, symbol-misusing animals
- Inventors of the negative
- Separated from natural surroundings by tools of our own making
- Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy
- Aware of our own mortality
- Rotten with perfection
Identification/Consubstantiality
- Pragmatic (in service to a cause)
- Unification against others (antithesis)
- Unconscious & Implicit (essential)
Identification + Desire
- Narrative Form--the Creation and Satisfaction of Expectations
- Arouse and Gratify Needs
- Three kinds of form:
- Conventional
- Repetitive
- Progressive
- Syllogistic
- Qualitative
Persuasion Requires:
- Freedom or Choice
- Purpose or Will
- Motion or Movement
The Pentad
- Act
- Agent
- Agency
- Scene
- 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:
- Scapegoating
- Creates victims and perpetrators
- Unification against shared enemy
- 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
Kenneth Burke
Based in part on Foss/Foss/Trapp Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric Reading
