Burke and War: Rhetoricizing the Theory of Dramatism

Abstract

While rhetoricians are familiar with Kenneth Burke's epigram Ad bellum purificandum, little attention has been paid to why the “purification of war” would be Burke's purpose in A Grammar of Motives. Yet the Grammar, with its theory of dramatism, was written throughout a conflict Burke called “the mightiest war the human race will ever experience.” This article recovers Burke's wartime writings and explores the impact of World War II on his intellectual development. Arguing that Burke's dialectical project was conceived as a specific, hortatory response to the absolutism of total war, it recontextualizes Burkean themes of ambiguity, transcendence, dialectic, and action as it “rhetoricizes” dramatism, placing it within its original cultural/material conversational parlor.

Notes

¹Sincere thanks are due most especially to Ann George, as well as Nan Johnson, Brian Fehler, and RR peer reviewers Barry Brummett and Shane Borrowman, for their helpful critical feedback on this article.

²Sources labeled “BP” are from the Kenneth Burke Papers at The Pennsylvania State University.

³Burke's role at the start of the Popular Front is well known—his speech to the First American Writer's Congress in 1935 is an apocryphal Burke story recently well explicated by George and Selzer. What is less well known is the impact of Burke's thought on the Front, yet cultural historian Michael Denning calls Burke “the major cultural theorist of the Popular Front” (445).

⁴Burke had unsuccessfully submitted his name for a job to Archibald MacLeish, Director of the Office of Facts and Figures, in late 1941 (1/9/42, BP), and to Harold Lasswell of the Library of Congress's Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications in 1942 (1/6/43, BP).

⁵Sources labeled “TC” are from the Allen Tate Collection at Princeton University Library.

⁶Wess explains the sudden focus on substance as a practical way to speak of the grounding of the pentad in general (“Burke's Dialectic” 16); I believe that the intrinsic/extrinsic nature of “substance” made it a particularly appealing choice.

⁷I am suggesting in this article that rhetorical theory be read in a similar intrinsic/extrinsic fashion.

Allen Tate Collection [TC] (Correspondence Box 61, Folder 13), Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Kenneth Burke Papers [BP], Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library, The Pennsylvania State University.