Kenneth Burke's Rhetorical Thinking

Robert Ivie

Lecture by Robert Ivie, Professor Emeritus at Indiana University at Bloomington is an adjunct professor at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, Section for Rhetoric.

The lecture discusses Kenneth Burke as rhetorical theorist and social critic. Burke, who is probably the most important rhetorical theorist of the Twentieth Century, understood human relations as symbolic action and rhetoric as drama.

Key Burkean concepts are explained in three movements - definition of man, victimage ritual, and comic corrective - to offer insight into his attitude toward rhetoric as an act of identification compensating for human division.