A brief introduction to Kenneth Burke.

1. EDITOR, CRITIC, NOVELIST, PHILOSOPHER, POET, PROFESSOR,
RHETORICIAN

2. • Kenneth Burke was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania May
5,1897.
• Attended Ohio State University for one semester.
• He then studied at Columbia University, but dropped out to be a writer.
• In his writing career, Burke made friends with famous writers such as Hart
Crane, Malcolm Cowley, Gorham Munson and Allen Tate.
• Married Lily Batterham in 1919 had three daughters (Burke later married
Lily’s sister Elizabeth Batterham and had two sons).
• Burke was the chief editor of The Dial in 1923.
• Received the Dial Award in 1928.
• Taught at Bennigton college for a decade, even though he never received a
college degree.
• Kenneth Burke died of heart failure November 19, 1993.

3. • Sigmund Freud and his perspective on the Id, ego and super-ego.
• Karl Marx and his analysis of history.
• Aristotle and his perspectives on ethos, pathos, and logos.
• All the works of William Shakespeare.

4. • Counter-Statement (1931)
• Permanence and Change (1935)
• Attitudes Toward History (1937)
• The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)
• The Study of Symbolic Function (1942)
• Grammar of Motives (1945)
• A Rhetoric of Motives (1950)

5. "Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal,
inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative),
separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making,
goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order),
and rotten with perfection".
Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 1966
• He saw humans as symbol users.
• There are no negatives in nature
• Guilt only exists when we do things we should not do.
• Tools and technology have removed humans from nature.
• Humans are drawn to order and status.

6. • Introduced by Kenneth Burke in his essay "The Study of Symbolic Function" (1942).
• The analysis of human motivation by viewing events as a drama.
• Burke wanted to understand how people justified their behavior (especially socially unacceptable
behavior).
• Dramatism is a perspective that has the layout of a play.
"Dramatism is a method of analysis and a corresponding critique of terminology
designed to show that the most direct route to the study of human relations and
human motives is via methodical inquiry into cycles or clusters of terms and their
functions.“
(Kenneth Burke, "Dramatism." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1968)

7. Identification Pentad
Guilt-Redemption
cycle

8. "You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his
language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image,
attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.“ - Kenneth
Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives
• People identify with those with whom they share similarities.
• Identification can be regarded as physical characteristics, talents,
occupation, experiences, personality, beliefs, and attitudes.
• The more similarities a speaker holds with his/hers audience, the
greater the identification.
• Burke stated, “Without identification, there will be no persuasion.”

9. Burke's Dramatic Pentad serves as a guide to understanding human motives.
• As a method of analyzing text
• As a way of generating ideas about a text

10. • Burke believed that
the motivation of all
public speaking was to
rid ourselves of GUILT.
• Examples Include:
 Tension
 Shame
 Embarrassment
Mortification
Confess guilt and
ask for
forgiveness
Victimage/Scapegoating
placing the guilt on
someone/something
Transcendence
Justify guilt in
reference to a
higher calling

11. Bobbit, D. A. (2004). The Rhetoric of Redemption. United States of America: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Brown, M. E. (1969). Kenneth Burke. Minneapolis: Jones Press.
Stark, F. M. (1996). Communicative Interaction, Power, and the State. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Winterowd, R. W. (1986). Kenneth Burke. Dictionary of lierary Biography Vol. 45, 74-79.
Sellnow, D. D. (2010). The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture . Thousand Oaks : SAGE
Publications .

12. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYjpjVDG6zs