ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the critical approach of Kenneth Burke, who explored the complex relationships among aesthetics, politics, language, and society. Burke has influenced countless students of rhetoric and literature as well as sociologists, political scientists, historians, linguists, and philosophers. Burke believed that the essential drama of a situation is only revealed when rhetoric exploits it. Burke was fascinated by the negative. He accounted for the omnipresence of rhetoric by looking to the inevitable divisions among people and between people and their personal goals. Burke's interpreters often describe his critical approach as a system of conceptual principles, but it sometimes appears as a loose confederation of ideas that Burke used—brilliantly, but erratically. Not being Kenneth Burke, we must proceed carefully. The key to Burkean criticism is asking how and why a text is dramatized. Criticism was therefore not a trivial activity for Burke, since he saw that people make their grandest and most heinous statements with symbols.
