Kenneth Joseph Burke

On Symbols and Society

On Symbols and Society

Language As Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method

Counter-Statement

A Grammar of Motives.

A Rhetoric of Motives.

The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology

The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action

Kenneth Burke: A Sociology of Knowledge: Dramatism, Ideology, and Rhetoric

The American philosopher and literary critic Kenneth Burke was an "ideologist" (although he never called himself this, and added to that, he spent most of his life avoiding the Marxist term of ideology to describe human "systems" of ideas). Burke instead used the terms "orientation," "rationalizatio...

Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication)

Kenneth Burke may be best known for his theories of dramatism and of language as symbolic action, but few know him as one of the twentieth century's foremost theorists of the relationship between language and bodies. In Moving Bodies, Debra Hawhee focuses on Burke's studies from the 1930s, 40s, and ...

Counter-Statement

A valuable feature of the second edition (1953) of Counter-Statement was the Curriculum Criticum in which the author placed the book in terms of his later work. For this new paperback edition, Mr. Burke continues his "curve of development" in an Addendum which surveys the course of his though in sub...

On Symbols and Society (Heritage of Sociology Series)

Kenneth Burke's innovative use of dramatism and dialectical method have made him a powerful critical force in an extraordinary variety of disciplines—education, philosophy, history, psychology, religion, and others. While most widely acclaimed as a literary critic, Burke has elaborated a perspective...

The Philosophy of Literary Form

From the ForewordThese pieces are selections from work done in the Thirties, a decade so changeable that I at first thought of assembling them under the title, "While Everything Flows."  Their primary interest is in speculation on the nature of linguistic, or symbolic, or literary action--and in a s...

The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology

"But the point of Burke's work, and the significance of his achievement, is not that he points out that religion and language affect each other, for this has been said before, but that he proceeds to demonstrate how this is so by reference to a specific symbolic context. After a discussion 'On Words...

Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, Third edition

Permanence and Change was written and first published in the depths of the Great Depression. Attitudes Toward History followed it two years later. These were revolutionary texts in the theory of communication, and, as classics, they retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change treats huma...

Language As Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method

From the Preface:The title for this collection was the title of a course in literary criticism that I gave for many years at Bennington College. And much of the material presented here was used in that course. The title should serve well to convey the gist of these various pieces. For all of them ar...

Fredric James

…[6] His research focused on critical theory: thinkers of, and influenced by, the Frankfurt School such as Kenneth Burke, Gyrgy Lukcs, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Sartre, who viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist th...

Kenneth Burke

Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 November 19, 1993) was an American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and...