Kennneth Burke's "attitude" at the crossroads of rhetorical and cultural studies: A proposal and...

THE WORK OF Kenneth Burke marks the intellectual crossroads of the history of American rhetorical theory. Burke's ideas at once nudged the neo-Aristotelian notion of "context" into the broader term of "scene," and provided an avenue for the development of the more culturally-oriented rhetorical theories that currently permeate the field. In addition to his dramatistic pentad, Burke's discussions of tropes (Moore, 1996), frames (Brummett, 1984a; Carlson, 1988), and representative anecdotes (Brummett, 1984b) have inspired scholarship that illustrated how the symbols we use are at once a reflection, selection, and deflection of socio-cultural realities (Burke, 1945). Contemporary scholars have recently turned this idea back on Burke, though, to illustrate how the symbols he used reveals-among other perspectives-his tendency to describe human symbolic activity in universal terms, an approach that obscures the diversity of rhetorical activity (e.g., Chesebro, 1992; Condit, 1992; Murray, 1998). The question of Burke's relevance to contemporary rhetorical scholarship has produced a number of scholarly efforts that attempt to refine them and/or connect them to more "cutting-edge" developments in rhetorical theory (e.g., Brock, 1995; Chesebro, 1993).