Burkean Analysis

General Themes and Motivations

Burke developed some of the most powerful and novel conceptual tools for rhetorical theory and analysis in the 20th century. In one of his earliest works of literary criticism, Counter-Statement, Burke returned to and reinvigorated the ancient art of a rhetorical approach to literary criticism even as his definition of the term adapted it for modern audiences. Against those high-modern critics who would equate rhetoric with mere artifice, Burke persuasively explained it as the power of language or symbolic communication to generate real material effects in the world. If a basic concern of literary analysis is to discriminate variations of the meaning of texts (e.g., novels, poems), Burkean analysis, by contrast, is concerned with what texts and other symbolic modes of communication (e.g., national flags or military badges) do.

Burke rejected any theory of language that remains purely referential, for a purely referential theory would assume that language corresponds in a nonproblematic way with an object it refers to or represents. For Burke, signs referred not to things but, rather, to other signs. Furthermore, and as a consequence of this critique, Burke critiqued an instrumental theory of language, that is, the idea that humans simply use communication to transmit meaning between each other. For Burke, language simply did not work that way. Language does more than describe some reality that is logically prior to it or more real than it, as if language were somehow adjacent to or outside of the real material world. Instead, language and symbols are always already part of the reality that they describe. So, when we use language, we alter, in however minor fashion, the reality we seek to describe; thus, it is through communication that we co-constitute who we are and how we understand our place and our purpose in the universe.

Humans, Burke argues in Permanence and Change, are the only living creatures with a way of addressing all of this linguistic and rhetorical theory—a language about language. This meta-language is, for Burke, precisely what separates us from other animals. As in ancient times, Burke would turn to the tools offered by the classical study of rhetoric to understand how and to what extent the figuration of language we use to make impressions on our auditors is equally available to those who would make impressions upon us—forcing us all to negotiate our way in an infinitely vast concatenation of signs connected to other signs, and so on to infinity.

...