Synopsis
A Grammar of Motives [hardcover] Burke, Kenneth [Jan 01, 1945] …
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From the Inside Flap
"A Grammar of Motives," published in 1945, is the first volume of a gigantic trilogy, planned to include A Rhetoric of Motives and A Symbolic of Motives, which will be called something like On Human Relations. The aim of the whole series is no less than the comprehensive exploration of human motives and the forms of thought and expression built around them, and its ultimate object, expression in the epigraph: 'ad bellum purificandum,' is to eliminate the whole world of conflict that can be eliminated through understanding. The method or key metaphor for the study is 'drama' or 'dramatism,' and the basic terms of analysis are the dramatistic pentad: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose. The Grammar, which Burke confesses in the Introduction grew from a prolegomena of a few hundred words to nearly 200,000, is a consideration of the purely internal relationship of these five terms, 'their possibilities of transformation, their range of permutations and combinations'..."—Stanley Edgar Hyman, author of The Armed Vision
About the Author
Kenneth Burke has been termed "simply the finest literary critic in the world, and perhaps the finest since Coleridge" (Stanley Edgar Hyman, The New Leader). Mr. Burke has published ten other works with the University of California Press: Towards a Better Life (1966); Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (1966) Collected Poems, 1915-1967 (1968); The Complete White Oxen: Collected Short Fiction of Kenneth Burke (1968); A Grammar of Motives (1969); Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1984); The Philosophy of Literary Form (1974); A Rhetoric of Motives (1969); The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1970); and Attitudes Toward History, Third Edition (1984).
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