Books by Kenneth Burke

Treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation. In this book, the author establishes that form permeates society just as it does poetry and the arts. It states that forms of art are not exclusively aesthetic: the cycles of a storm, the gradations of a sunrise, the undoing of Prince Hamlet are all instances of progressive form.

Marks the author's breakthrough in criticism from the literary and aesthetic into social theory and the philosophy of history. This title provides his first entry into what he calls his theory of Dramatism; and, an important section on the nature of ritual.

Suitable for a course in literary criticism, the title is concerned with the attempt to define and track down the implications of the term "symbolic action," and to show how the marvels of literature and language look when considered form that point of view.

Pointing out that religion and language affect each other, the author proceeds to demonstrate how this is so by reference to a specific symbolic context. He analysess verbal action in St Augustine's Confessions, and then discusses the first three chapters of Genesis, and ends with an imaginary dialogue between the Lord and Satan.

Words are aspects of a much wider communicative context, most of which is not verbal at all. Yet words also have a nature peculiarly their own. And when discussing them as modes of action, we must consider this nature as words in themselves and the nature they get from the non-verbal scenes that support their acts. This book deals with this topic.

Expands the field to human ways of persuasion and identification.