Kenneth Burke

Kenneth Burke, arguably the most important American literary theorist of the twentieth century, helped define the theoretical terrain for contemporary literary and cultural studies. His perspectives were literary and linguistic, but his influences ranged across history, philosophy, and the social sciences. In this important and original study Robert Wess traces the trajectory of Burke’s long career and situates his work in relation to postmodernity. His study is both an examination of contemporary theories of rhetoric, ideology, and the subject, and an explanation of why Burke failed to complete his Motives trilogy. Burke’s own critique of the ‘isolated unique individual’ led him to question the possibility of unique individuation, a strategy which anticipated important elements of postmodern concepts of subjectivity. Robert Wess’s study is both a timely and judicious exposition of Burke’s massive oeuvre, and a crucial intervention in current debates on rhetoric and human agency.

• First full-length study of Burke’s works following his career book by book in an interrelated, synoptic narrative • Theorises a rhetoric of the subject, replacing outdated conception of the subject as autonomous individual • Shows Burke anticipating central rhetorical and ideological concerns of postmodernism

1. Ideology as rhetoric; 2. Counter Statement: aesthetic humanism; 3. Permanence and Change: a biological subject of history; 4. Attitudes towards History: the agon of history; 5. The Philosophy of Literary Form: history without origin or telos; 6. A Grammar of Motives: the rhetorical constitution of the subject; 7. A Rhetoric of Motives: ideological and utopian rhetoric; 8. The Rhetoric of Religion: history in eclipse.