Attitudes Toward History, Third edition

This book marks Kenneth Burke’s breakthrough in criticism from the literary and aesthetic into social theory and the philosophy of history. In this volume we find Burke’s first entry into what he calls his theory of Dramatism; and here also is an important section on the nature of ritual.

Kenneth Burke has been termed "simply the finest literary critic in the world, and perhaps the finest since Coleridge" (Stanley Edgar Hyman, The New Leader). Mr. Burke has published ten other works with the University of California Press: Towards a Better Life (1966); Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (1966) Collected Poems, 1915-1967 (1968); The Complete White Oxen: Collected Short Fiction of Kenneth Burke (1968); A Grammar of Motives (1969); Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1984); The Philosophy of Literary Form (1974); A Rhetoric of Motives (1969); The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1970); and Attitudes Toward History, Third Edition (1984).

INTRODUCTION

PART I
ACCEPTANCE AND REJECTION

CHAPTER 1: WILLIAM JAMES, WHITMAN, AND EMERSON 
"Acceptance" and "Passivity", Rejection, The Changing Emphasis
of Frames, Sentimental Acceptance in Futurism

CHAPTER II: POETIC CATEGORIES
Tragedy, Comedy, Humor, the Ode, Negative Emphasis: the Elegy,
or Plaint, Satire, Burlesque, The Grotesque, Monasticism
and the Transitional, The Didactic, Didactic "Transcendence" in
Hesiod, Didactic Transcendence in Eliot, Other Instances of Transcendence

CHAPTER III: THE DESTINY OF ACCEPTANCE FRAMES 
Discomfitures of Rejection

CHAPTER IV: CONCLUSION

PART II
THE CURVE OF HISTORY

CHAPTER 1: CHRISTIAN EVANGELISM
CHAPTER II: MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS
CHAPTER 111: PROTESTANT TRANSITION
CHAPTER IV: NAIVE CAPITALISM
CHAPTER v: EMERGENT COLLECTIVISM
CHAPTER VI: COMIC CORRECTIVES

PART III
ANALYSIS OF SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE

CHAPTER 1: GENERAL NATURE OF RITUAL
The Tracking Down of Symbols, Synthesis and Analysis, Tests
of Selectivity, Analytic "Radiations",  Main Components of
Ritual
CHAPTER 11: DICTIONARY OF PIVOTAL TERMS
Alienation, Being Driven Into a Corner, Bridging Device, 
Bureaucratization of the Imaginative, Casuistic Stretching, 
Clust"rs, Communion, Control, Cues, Discounting, "Earning" One's World, 
Efficiency, Essence, Forensic, "Good Life", "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose",
Identity
Identification, Imagery, Legality, Lexicological, NcoMalthusian
Principle, Opportunism, Perspective by Incongruity, Problem of Evil,
Repossess the World, Rituals of Rebirth Salvation Device, Sect, 
Secular Prayer--or, extended: Character-building by Secular Prayer, 
Stealing Back and Forth of Symbols,Symbolic Mergers, Symbols of Authority,
Transcendence

CONCLUSION
AFTERWORD TO SECOND EDITION
APPENDIX: THE SEVEN OFFICES
AFTERWORD: ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY:
IN RETROSPECTIVE PROSPECT