Kenneth Burke: A Sociology of Knowledge: Dramatism, Ideology, and Rhetoric by J. M. Beach (PDF)

Description

The American philosopher and literary critic Kenneth Burke was an “ideologist” (although he never called himself this, and added to that, he spent most of his life avoiding the Marxist term of ideology to describe human “systems” of ideas). Burke instead used the terms “orientation,” “rationalization,” “perspective,” “critical perspective,” “way of life,” “critical mind-frame,” “Weltanschauung,” and “gestalt” to describe basically the main idea behind ideology: “a system of ideas, aiming at social or political action.” The first definition of ideology that Burke lists in A Rhetoric of Motives (his only book to mention the term ideology directly) is “the study, development, criticism of ideas,” which is exactly what Burke did for his entire philosophical life. Thus one could argue that the preeminent idea at the “center” of Burke’s thought is the role and function of ideology in terms of human individual and socio-cultural development and communication. It is my purpose to critically locate and order the many divergent trails of ideology that Burke blazed in his major works in order to present, through his many models, a tangible theory of ideology.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is a fairly decent introduction to Kenneth Burke’s preoccupation with the ideological parameters of language/communication. The author describes his little book as an “essay” and in so doing admits that his purpose is not to provide a comprehensive critique of Burke’s thinking. Rather, he presents his argument as a “culmination of Burke’s thought,” as well as “a foundation for something new”. As such, this essay acts as a lovely framework with which one can understand and grapple with Burke’s metholodology, which is way of thinking, interpreting and testing our thinking through uncovering the grammar and rhetoric of motives. In short, it suggests that for all the philosophical gymnastics that Burke performs, his primary motivation concerns the unmasking of ideology.Burke is a rather playful thinker, but his own style (which reminds me, for some reason, of Marshall McLuhan’s writing) tends towards the opaque. J.M Beach’s writing, on the other hand, is clear, accessible and concise in the way that it deals with the functional and dysfunctional nature of ideology. Still, a mild criticism of this book would be this: I would have liked to see a more detailed application of Burke’s dramatism and not just a description of what it is and what it aims to do. This criticism, by the way, is often used against Burke himself, and should therefore have been addressed even if only in passing. I would also have wanted the Kindle edition, which is the one I bought, to have been better formatted and easier to navigate (the table of contents is not hyper-linked).If you are already very familiar with Kenneth Burke’s work, this may not necessarily be the book for you (unless, that is, you have never considered his outlook as being overly concerned with ideology). But if you would like a nicely set out introduction to some of the core ideas of this fascinating thinker, this is a decent place to start.

⭐I have just begun to read this text and have been disappointed. The bar was set for me by W. Stark’s excellent text, The Sociology of Knowledge. I was hoping to find Stark’s text as an e-book, but was unsuccessful, so decided to try some current work on the subject.

⭐

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