Dramatism, an interpretive communication studies theory, was developed by Kenneth Burke as a way to analyze public speaking. Dramatism focuses on the role of the critic and their responsibility of uncovering a speaker’s motives. In this theory, Burke discusses two important ideas – that life IS drama, and that the ultimate motive of rhetoric is the purging of guilt. There are three key concepts associated with dramatism – identification, the dramatistic pentad, and guilt-redemption ^[1].

Key Concepts[link]

Dramatistic Pentad[link]

The Dramatistic Pentad is an instrument used by the critic to discover how the speaker convinces the audience to accept his view of reality. This is done through the five key elements of human drama – act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose ^[1].

• Act: What was done
• Scene: Where it was done
• Agent: Who did it
• Agency: How the speaker did it; methods or techniques
• Purpose: Why it happened

While it is important to understand each element of the Pentad on its own, it is more important to understand how the elements work together. This is called a ratio, and there are ten possible ratios within the Pentad. Burke maintained that analyzing the ratios of a speaker’s presentation would allow the critic to realize why the speaker selected a certain strategy and what this means about their worldview.

The Pentad is a simple tool for seeing and understanding the complexity of a situation. It reveals the nuances and complications of language as symbolic action, which in turn, opens up our perspective ^[2].

Guilt Redemption[link]

According to Burke, Guilt Redemption is considered the plot of all human drama, or the root of all rhetoric. In this perspective, Burke concluded that the ultimate motivation of man is to purge oneself of one's sense of guilt through public speaking. The term guilt covers tension, anxiety, shame, disgust, embarrassment, and other similar feelings. Guilt serves as a motivating factor that drives the human drama.

Burke claimed that the speaker could purge their guilt in one of two ways:

The first way is through victimage, or the process of scapegoating. Here, the speaker blames an external source for his ills^[1]. According to Burke, there are two different types of scapegoating, universal and factional. In universal scapegoating, the speaker blames everyone for the problem, so the audience associates and even feels sorry for the victim, because it includes themselves. In fractional scapegoating, the speaker blames a specific group or a specific person for their problems. This creates a division within the audience ^[3]. The victim, whoever it may be, is vilified, or made up to violate the ideals of social order, like normalcy or decency. As a result, by people who take action against the villains become heroized because they are confronting evil ^[4].

The second way the speaker purges their guilt is through mortification. This is a confession of guilt by the speaker and a request for forgiveness ^[1]. Normally, these people are sentenced to a certain punishment so they can reflect and realize their sins. This punishment is specifically a kind of “death,” literal or figuratively.

Many speakers experience a combination of these two guilt-purging options.

Application and Uses of theory[link]

• Ideas studied by scholars in a variety of fields, including English, communication, political science, psychology, sociology
• Analyze public address (why a speaker selects a certain strategy to identify with audience, like a Malcolm X speech)
• Religious themes
• Political advertising and political campaigns
• Corporate realm, business influence on federal policy agenda
• Used in writing courses to help students understand how language produces knowledge, professional communication, case studies
• Examine the nature of texts and narratives
• Study to test and compare other Burkeian methods
• Diplomacy as an example of stagecraft

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Adams, Gregory (1963). All the World's a Stage. New York, NY: Basic Books.
• Benoit, William L. (1983). Systems of Explanation: Aristotle and Burke on Cause. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 13, 41-57.
• Brock, Bernard L.; Burke, Kenneth; Burgess, Parke G.; Simons, Herbert W. (1985). Dramatism as Ontology or Epistemology: A Symposium. Communication Quarterly, 33, 17-33.
• Burke, Kenneth. Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare. Parlor Press, 2007.
• Burke, Kenneth. (1978). "Questions and Answers about the Pentad." College Composition and Communication, 29(4), 330-335.
• Crable, Bryan. (2000). Burke's Perspective on Perspectives: Grounding Dramatism in the Representative Anecdote. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 86, 318-333.
• Fox, Catherine.(2002). Beyond the Tyranny of the Real: Revisiting Burke's Pentad as Research Method for Professional Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 11, 365-388.
• Griffin, Em. (2006). A First Look at Communication Theory. (6th ed.) New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
• Hamlin, William J.; Nichols, Harold J. (1973). The Interest Value of Rhetorical Strategies Derived from Kenneth Burke's Pentad. Western Speech, 37, 97-102.
• Manning, Peter K. (1999). High Risk Narratives: Textual Adventures. Qualitative Sociology, 22, 285-299.
• Miller, K. (2005). Communication theories: perspectives, processes, and contexts.(2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
• Overington, M. (1977). Kenneth Burke and the Method of Dramatism. Theory and Society, 4, 131-156.

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

Personal history[link]

He was born on May 5 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and graduated from Peabody High School, where his friend Malcolm Cowley was also a student. Burke attended Ohio State University for only a semester, then studied at Columbia University in 1916-1917 before dropping out to be a writer. In Greenwich Village he kept company with avant-garde writers such as Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, Gorham Munson, and later Allen Tate.^[1] Raised Roman Catholic, Burke later became an avowed agnostic.

In 1919 he married Lily Mary Batterham, with whom he had three daughters: the late feminist, Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987); musician (Jeanne) Elspeth Chapin Hart (b. 1920); and writer and poet France Burke (b. ~1925). He would later marry her sister Elizabeth Batterham in 1933 and have two sons, Michael and Anthony. Burke served as the editor of the modernist literary magazine The Dial in 1923, and as its music critic from 1927-1929. Kenneth himself was an avid player of the saxophone and flute. He received the Dial Award in 1928 for distinguished service to American literature. He was the music critic of The Nation from 1934–1936, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935.^[2]

In later life his New Jersey farm was a popular summer retreat for his extended family, as reported by his grandson Harry Chapin, a contemporary popular song artist. He died of heart failure at his home in Andover, New Jersey.^[3]

Influences[link]

Burke, like many twentieth century theorists and critics, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a lifelong interpreter of Shakespeare, and was also significantly influenced by Thorstein Veblen. Burke corresponded with a number of literary critics, thinkers, and writers over the years, including William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ralph Ellison, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore.^[4] Later thinkers who have acknowledged Burke's influence include Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, Susan Sontag (his student at the University of Chicago), Erving Goffman,^[5] Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, Rene Girard, Fredric Jameson, Michael Calvin McGee, Dell Hymes and Clifford Geertz.

Burke resisted being pigeonholed as a follower of any philosophical or political school of thought, and had a notable and very public break with the Marxists who dominated the literary criticism set in the 1930s. The political and social power of symbols was central to Burke's scholarship throughout his career. His political engagement is evident, for example, at the outset of A Grammar of Motives in its epigraph, ad bellum purificandum -- toward the purification of war, with "pure" war implying its elimination. Burke felt that the study of rhetoric would help human beings understand "what is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it." Burke called such analysis "dramatism" and believed that such an approach to language analysis and use could help us understand the basis of conflict, the virtues and dangers of cooperation, and the opportunities of identification and consubstantiality.

Philosophy[link]

Burke defined the rhetorical function of language as "a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." His definition of humanity states that "man" is "the symbol using, making, and mis-using animal, inventor of the negative, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, and rotten with perfection."^[6][7] For Burke, some of the most significant problems in human behavior resulted from instances of symbols using human beings rather than human beings using symbols.

Burke proposed that when we attribute motives to others, we tend to rely on ratios between five elements: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. This has become known as the dramatistic pentad. The pentad is grounded in his dramatistic method, which considers human communication as a form of action. Dramatism "invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action" (Grammar of Motives xxii). Burke pursued literary criticism not as a formalistic enterprise but rather as an enterprise with significant sociological impact; he saw literature as "equipment for living," offering folk wisdom and common sense to people and thus guiding the way they lived their lives.

Another key concept for Burke is the terministic screen -- a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us. Here Burke offers rhetorical theorists and critics a way of understanding the relationship between language and ideology. Language, Burke thought, doesn't simply "reflect" reality; it also helps select reality as well as deflect reality.

In his book Language as Symbolic Action (1966), Burke defined humankind as a "symbol using animal" (p. 3). This definition of man, he argued, means that "reality" has actually "been built up for us through nothing but our symbol system" (p. 5). Without our encyclopedias, atlases, and other assorted reference guides, we would know little about the world that lies beyond our immediate sensory experience. What we call "reality," Burke stated, is actually a "clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present . . . a construct of our symbol systems" (p. 5). College students wandering from class to class, from English literature to sociology to biology to calculus, encounter a new reality each time they enter a classroom; the courses listed in a university's catalogue "are in effect but so many different terminologies" (p. 5). It stands to reason then that people who consider themselves to be Christian, and who internalize that religion's symbol system, inhabit a reality that is different from the one of practicing Buddhists, or Jews, or Muslims. The same would hold true for people who believe in the tenets of free market capitalism or socialism, Freudian psychoanalysis or Jungian depth psychology, as well as mysticism or materialism. Each belief system has its own vocabulary to describe how the world works and what things mean, thus presenting its adherents with a specific reality (no page reference).

Later works[link]

Burke was awarded the National Medal for Literature at the American Book Awards in 1981. According to the New York Times, April 20, 1981, 'The $15,000 award, endowed in memory of the late Harold Guinzberg, founder of the Viking Press, honors a living American writer for a distinguished and continuing contribution to American letters. '

He also wrote the song "One Light in a Dark Valley," later recorded by his grandson Harry Chapin.[1]

His work on criticism was a driving force for placing him back into the university spotlight. As a result, he was able to teach and lecture at various colleges, including Bennington College, while continuing his literary work. Many of Kenneth Burke's personal papers and correspondence are housed at Pennsylvania State University's Special Collections Library.

Principal works[link]

• Counter-Statement (1931)
• "Towards a Better Life" (1932)
• Permanence and Change (1935)
• Attitudes Toward History (1937)
• The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" (1939)
• Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)
• A Grammar of Motives (1945)
• A Rhetoric of Motives (1950)
• The Rhetoric of Religion (1961)
• Language As Symbolic Action (1966)
• Dramatism and Development (1972)
• Here and Elsewhere (2005)
• Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives (2006)
• Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare (2007)
• Full bibliography of Burke's writings

Correspondence[link]

• Jay, Paul, editor, The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981, New York: Viking, 1988, ISBN 0-670-81336-2
• East, James H., editor, The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke, Columbia, USC, 2004

References[link]

• Author and Book Info.com

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Kenneth Burke

• Resources and outlines on Kenneth Burke's corpus.
• The Virtual Burkeian Parlor and the Kenneth Burke Discussion List
• KB Journal
• Article on Burke's legacy
• Introduction to Burke
• The Kenneth Burke Society
• The Rhetorician Resource's Kenneth Burke page
• Complete text and audio of Burke's Drew Seminary Lecture on a Theory of Terms