
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy
Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication)? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer
discounts of up to 90% on
Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication). Check out the link below:
>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers
Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication) ReviewThis book deserves a much wider audience. It is, first and foremost, a history of aesthetics in the 20th century--about the battle between art for art's sake (New Criticism) and Kenneth Burke's prescient argument that no art is without value judgements, without cultural and sociological biases and blind spots. The New Critics argued that ambiguity or extreme tension made art above politics, always even-handed because it was always ambivalent. This isn't a complete picture because, first of all, only a populace well-situated in terms of material goods and civil rights (well-fed, and with a sense of ease it took for granted because it assumed that sense of ease was universal)could write or read poetry and fiction as mere objects of art. New Criticism also made art hopelessly poised, or equipoised, which is to say inert. And yet Burke WAS a New Critic in his insistence on complexity and irony. He just argued for a more dynamic view of irony: for the fact that even complexity is persuasive; that even a lament or endorsement can be complex, not one-dimensional. Burke's ideas constitute a cultural poetics, and it's a more intellectually sound and generative cultural poetics than the strident New Historicism which emerged decades later. Besides being a history of aesthetics in the 20th century, this book also serves as a biography of Burke--a biography valuable in itself, because Burke will increasingly be seen as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. The level of research here is mind-boggling, but it's always effortlessly deployed. The book is a serious and seriously good.
Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication) OverviewIn Burke, War, Words, M. Elizabeth Weiser reinserts Kenneth Burke's theory of dramatism into the social milieu from which it originated, fostering a new understanding of how this concept of motivation was itself motivated by war and criticism. Weiser's model of a new approach to historiography contextualizes
Dramatism was a direct response to the global crisis wrought by World War II and to Burke's then-ongoing debates with New Critics, sociolinguists, political activists, and government propagandists over the role of language and communication to affect the world. Central to Burke's germinal volume A Grammar of Motives, dramatism was a call to action advocating informed social dialogue at a time when an allied victory seemed dependent instead on rallying behind a single strong voice in a unity not unlike that mandated by fascism itself. Weiser contends that Burke conceived dramatism as an alternative to New Criticism and as a blueprint for a dialectical resolution that was an antifascist rhetorical response to war.
Weiser draws from published and unpublished communications between Burke and the diverse and divergent literati of his era as well as from Burke's scholarly, political, and even poetic writings of the time. From this context she is able to map the complex arc of formulating A Grammar of Motives in Burke's larger wartime discourse. For Weiser establishing the origins of dramatism offers a model for enhancing our understanding of other rhetorical theories as well as a specific renewal of purpose for dramatism as an action-oriented tool to engage intellectuals in our conflicted age as Burke had envisioned in his.
Want to learn more information about
Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication)?
>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now