Re‐visiting Kenneth Burke: Dramatism/logology and the problem of agency

Abstract

In this essay we propose that the corpus of Kenneth Burkes work can be examined as an effort to grapple with the issues involved in what we will call the “problem of agency.” We argue that Burke oscillated between an affirmation of a voluntarist view of human action, with its related aesthetic theory of symbolic action, and multiple attempts to integrate action and motion within a symbolicity‐centered model of “practical” criticism. We conclude that the core problematic in his perspective on the problem of agency led him to end his career where he began, with an essentially aesthetic perspective on critical action.