Mythic evolution of “The new frontier” in mass mediated rhetoric

This essay combines the concept of “rhetorical narration” with Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad to argue that definitional cultural myths are rhetorically meaningful in relation to social consciousness when both are viewed as evolving teleologically. It delineates two phases of change in America's frontier myth associated with the transformation of the pentadic term “scene” from land to space, as represented in recent space fiction films: a mythic disjunction resulting from pentadic inconsistency with the new scene, followed by mythic coherence resulting from pentadic change to establish consistency.