About the Book
As critic Kenneth Burke's preoccupations were at the beginning purely esthetic and literary; but after Counter-Statement (1931) he began to discriminate a "rhetorical" or persuasive component in literature and thereupon became a philosopher of language and human conduct.
In A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) Burke's conception of "symbolic action" comes into its own: all human activities—linguisitc or extra-linguistic—are modes of symbolizing; man is defined as the symbol-using (and -misusing) animal. The critic's job becomes one of the interpreting human symbolizing wherever he finds it with the aim of illuminating human motivation. Thus the reach of the literary critic now extends to the social and ethical.
A Grammar of Motives is a "methodical meditation" on such complex linguistic forms as plays stories poems theologies metaphysical systems political philosophies constitutions. A Rhetoric of Motives expands the field to human ways of persuasion and identification. Persuasion as Burke sees it "ranges from the bluntest quest of advantage as in sales promotion or propaganda through courtship social etiquette education and the sermon to a 'pure' form that delights in the process of appeal for itself alone without ulterior purpose. And identification ranges from the politician who addressing an audience of farmers says 'I was a farm boy myself,' through the mysteries of social status to the mystic's devout identification with the sources of all being."
In A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) Burke's conception of "symbolic action" comes into its own: all human activities—linguisitc or extra-linguistic—are modes of symbolizing; man is defined as the symbol-using (and -misusing) animal. The critic's job becomes one of the interpreting human symbolizing wherever he finds it with the aim of illuminating human motivation. Thus the reach of the literary critic now extends to the social and ethical.
A Grammar of Motives is a "methodical meditation" on such complex linguistic forms as plays stories poems theologies metaphysical systems political philosophies constitutions. A Rhetoric of Motives expands the field to human ways of persuasion and identification. Persuasion as Burke sees it "ranges from the bluntest quest of advantage as in sales promotion or propaganda through courtship social etiquette education and the sermon to a 'pure' form that delights in the process of appeal for itself alone without ulterior purpose. And identification ranges from the politician who addressing an audience of farmers says 'I was a farm boy myself,' through the mysteries of social status to the mystic's devout identification with the sources of all being."