Epistemology and ontology in Kenneth Burke's dramatism

Abstract

Kenneth Burke initially established dramatism as a method for understanding the social uses of language. An examination of Burke's major rhetorical concepts—identification, the definition of the human being, the concept of reality, and terms for order—reveals the epistemology of his dramatism as a marriage of paradox and metaphor. However, recently Burke has shifted dramatism towards a philosophy. Three shifts establish a dramatism based upon “act,”; not the tension between “action”; and “motion,”; dramatism that employs language “literally,”; rather than exploiting its ambiguity, and dramatism that is more “reality”; oriented rather than the link that orders and relates “reality”; to our abstract values.

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