Richard M. Weaver's uses of Kenneth Burke

Abstract

This article first briefly identifies a number of parallel viewpoints on rhetoric that Burke and Weaver probably developed independently. Then, it describes a faculty seminar taught by Burke in 1949 in which Weaver participated. The primary focus of this investigation is to trace and to account for the eight direct citations of Burke by Weaver and the approximately twenty unacknowledged uses of Burke by Weaver. These direct citations and unattributed uses are concentrated in two of Weavers essays, “The Rhetoric of Social Science” and “Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” and in his book The Ethics of Rhetoric. Weaver drew primarily on Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and secondarily on his A Grammar of Motives, the two books that were the focus of the seminar taught by Burke and attended by Weaver.