Böcker av Kenneth Burke

Expands the field to human ways of persuasion and identification.

On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows brings together the late essays, autobiographical reflections, an interview, and a poem by the eminent literary theorist and cultural critic Kenneth Burke (1897-1993). Burke, author of Language as Symbolic Action, A Grammar of Motives, and Rhetoric of Motives, among other works, was an innovative and original thinker who worked at the intersection of sociology, psychology, literary theory, and semiotics. This book, a selection of fourteen representative pieces of his productive later years, addresses many important themes Burke tackled throughout his career such as logology (his attempt to find a universal language theory and methodology), technology, and ecology. The essays also elaborate Burke's notions about creativity and its relation to stress, language and its literary uses, the relation of mind and body, and more. Provocative, idiosyncratic, and erudite, On Human Nature makes a significant statement about cultural linguistics and is an important rounding-out of the Burkean corpus.

A 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. In this edition, he continues his "curve of development" in an Addendum which surveys the course of his subsequent books (up to the publication of Collected Poems, 1915-1967) and work-in-progress.

Treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation. In this book, the author establishes that form permeates society just as it does poetry and the arts. It states that forms of art are not exclusively aesthetic: the cycles of a storm, the gradations of a sunrise, the undoing of Prince Hamlet are all instances of progressive form.

Marks the author's breakthrough in criticism from the literary and aesthetic into social theory and the philosophy of history. This title provides his first entry into what he calls his theory of Dramatism; and, an important section on the nature of ritual.

Suitable for a course in literary criticism, the title is concerned with the attempt to define and track down the implications of the term "symbolic action," and to show how the marvels of literature and language look when considered form that point of view.

Pointing out that religion and language affect each other, the author proceeds to demonstrate how this is so by reference to a specific symbolic context. He analysess verbal action in St Augustine's Confessions, and then discusses the first three chapters of Genesis, and ends with an imaginary dialogue between the Lord and Satan.

Words are aspects of a much wider communicative context, most of which is not verbal at all. Yet words also have a nature peculiarly their own. And when discussing them as modes of action, we must consider this nature as words in themselves and the nature they get from the non-verbal scenes that support their acts. This book deals with this topic.

Concerned with the basic forms of through which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives.