Kenneth Burke's “five dogs” and Mother Teresa's love

Abstract

Mother Teresa's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech presents special difficulties for the rhetorical critic. Its form is disjointed, rambling, and seemingly unfocused; at the same time, the speaker and the occasion are important, and the speech is moving. However, Kenneth Burke's “Five Dogs” segment in Language as Symbolic Action can be applied usefully in analyzing Mother Teresa's address. Burke's five levels of meaning—primal, lexical, jingle, entelechial, and tautological—provide a flexible, heuristic critical tool for speeches in which key terms carry special significance. This essay analyzes Burke's construct and applies it critically to Mother Teresa's speech.