Small Strokes Big Oaks

This is part of a series of posts about rhetoric and feminism.  I’ll be writing these responses every week as part of my graduate class about Topics in Rhetoric this semester, and I welcome any and all responses!

I’m reading Kenneth Burke’s idea of Dramatism correctly, it seems he is subscribing to Shakespeare’s idea that “All the world’s a stage,” and that rhetors are merely actors responding to situations.  As Foss, Foss, and Trapp discuss, Burke believed that motivation could be found by analyzing any given rhetorical situation using a dramatic pentad consisting of five terms: act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose (Contemporary Perspectives 200).  They state: “Motives and language are so closely associated that an analysis of a rhetorical artifact can point to a rhetor’s underlying motives” and suggest that Burke’s pentad is a mode of analysis of a rhetorical situation that will help find the motivation behind a situation.  Burke himself says: “These five terms… have been labeled the dramatistic pentad; the aim of calling attention to them in this way is to show how the functions which they designate operate in the imputing of motives” (Readings 160-161).  It seems, as his essay on dramatism continues, that he disagrees with Aristotle, who had been quoted as saying that human action is like sheer motion and, therefore, they can be ignorant of these five elements in the pentad; Burke continues on to refute this by saying that symbol-using animals, like humans, have motivation behind their actions and, therefore, are not participating in sheer motion.

This mention of symbols seems in line with what I.A. Richards spoke of in his essay, “The Philosophy of Rhetoric,” when he discussed the semantic triangle.  However, Burke seems less concerned with symbols, objects, and implied meaning and more in line with the Sophists (and Lloyd F. Bitzer, for that matter) and their focus on kairos or exigence.  Kairos and exigence were defined as the immediate need for any rhetorical situation, and Burke’s idea of motivation seems closest in line with these two terms.

The idea of the dramatic pentad and motivation are particularly interesting to me, as I just finished writing a draft of my capstone project analyzing interviews from bloggers according to Szwed’s five elements of a literacy event: texts, contexts, participants, functions, and motivations.  It seems that Szwed’s version is very similar to Burke’s, where texts are the scenes, contexts are either the agency or scene, participants are the agents themselves, and the function is the purpose.  As Foss, Foss, and Trapp state: “Purpose is not synonymous with motive.  Motive is the much broader, often unconscious reason for the performance of the act” (Contemporary Perspectives 202).  With Szwed, as well, the function and motivation are very different; function is equivalent with purpose, and motivation is the broader reason for the bloggers’ writing and inspiration.  As I was analyzing the bloggers’ responses, I noticed that the function and motivation often overlapped – they were writing to inform the world about feminist issues and values, and were motivated by the desire to inform the world about feminist issues and values.  It was clear, however, that each participant was motivated by personal factors; some wanted to be funny feminists, others wanted to carve out a space for themselves, etc.

If I were to have used Burke’s pentad to analyze the responses, I imagine the results would have been very similar.  The act in this rhetorical situation would most likely be blogging.  The scene would be very difficult to define because the nature of the internet is such that there is no one scene, per se, but many blogs, each being their own scene.  The agents in this case might be the feminist bloggers, or each individual blogger would be a single agent in any rhetorical situation, so the agency would be the use of computers and blogging platforms to compose posts and publish them, as well as the use of social networking to promote the blogs.  Finally, the purpose of the feminist bloggers would be to inform the world about feminist issues.  The bloggers are, then, motivated by a desire to inform the world about feminism, as well as by their own personal motivations.

Although not much changes when using Burke’s analysis, it is interesting to note how similar literacy theorists and rhetorical theorists truly are!

Works Cited

Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp.  “Kenneth Burke” Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric.  Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 2002. 187-232.

Burke, Kenneth.  “Dramatism” Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp, ed. Readings in Contemporary Rhetoric.  Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 2002.  160-170.