Word man at war: the development of Kenneth Burke's dramatism

Abstract

"What am I but a word man?" asked Kenneth Burke, one of the 20 th century's greatest rhetorical theorists. This aspect of Burke's work-- his place in the panoply of "word men" of his era-- is downplayed when discussion turns to the initiation of his great work on human relations, A Grammar of Motives . Indeed, scholars have most often discussed Burke's Grammar and the dramatism at its heart in relation to other possible generating or derivational theories, or in its pedagogical potential. Yet Burke's own approach, beginning with a grammar before attempting his planned rhetoric and symbolic, argues for a more ontological method. My dissertation offers an extended analysis of Burke's public and private writing just prior to and during the Second World War-- work that led to both The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) and A Grammar of Motives (1945)-- as rhetorical action emerging from and responding to the conversations of his circle of "word men" as they confronted the problematic role of art during war. In the Introduction, I argue that Burke came to his understanding of dramatism in part because of his increasingly critical dialogue with those who would become the first generation of New Critics-- Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom. Chapters One and Two place Burke in the midst of the "literary wars" between Esthetes and Marxists and show how The Philosophy of Literary Form proposes a "battle plan" for poets and critics to diagnose society through literature. Chapters Three and Four analyze the pressures exerted by the Second World War and Burke's response: A Grammar of Motives that detailed a methodology to understand the ambiguities of motivation and so to transcend physical divisions with language-based mergers. The Grammar aimed to "purify war" not by opposition but by ironic transcendence. I conclude by analyzing why the Grammar failed to achieve its hoped-for goals in the immediate post-war years and why this moment may be a more propitious time to reexamine Burke's vision-- to recontextualize his rhetorical scene in order to shed light on our own.