Rhetorical and Dramatism Analysis

The Pentad

When discussing Burke’s dramatism, one typically talks about its most recognized feature, the pentad. In dramatism, Burke laid out the five major components of drama: act (what was done), agent (who did it), scene (where it was done), agency (how the agent did it, techniques), and purpose (why the act happened). Together, these components give insight into a speaker’s motivations. Language, then, explains “the world” to people because language is generative—it forms the way people perceive and react to the world.

An example of dramatistic criticism would be useful to really understand what Burke means when he talks about the connections between language and motivations. Brian Ott and Eric Aoki utilize dramatism in their analysis of popular press treatments of the Matthew Shepherd murder. In 1998, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson lured Shepherd from a Laramie, Wyoming, bar to a desolate field. They tied him to a fence, bludgeoned him with the butt of a .357 magnum, stole his shoes and his wallet, and left him to die in the freezing temperatures. In the aftermath of this heinous crime, it became clear that McKinney and Henderson assaulted Shepherd for being gay. Ott and Aoki argue that media stories of the Shepherd murder used rhetorical scapegoating—blaming a cultural ill or pollution—to alleviate the American public’s guilt over anti-gay hate crimes. In turn, though, this scapegoating ultimately made it more difficult to pass legislation that would prevent anti-gay violence from happening in the future. If this example is considered in terms of the dramatistic pentad, the act is the articles written in popular press about the Shepherd murder, the agent is the press outlets, the scene is the circulation of these print articles, the agency is the technique of scapegoating an imagined cultural “ill,” and the purpose is to alleviate the public’s guilt over anti-gay hate crime because two people who acted horribly were blamed rather than a systemic cultural homophobia.

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