ABSTRACT
The theory and method of dramatism, as discussed earlier, consists of applying five key terms—act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose—to textual forms. In a later essay, Burke suggested that “attitude” be added to the five, making a hexad of his scheme. He summarized his reasons for the selection of these terms, as the elements of a grammar of motives, as follows:
Dramatism centers in observations of this sort: for there to be an act, there must be an agent. Similarly, there must be a scene in which the agent acts. To act in a scene, the agent must employ some means, an agency. And it can be called an action in the full sense of the term only if it involves a purpose. . . . The pattern is incipiently a hexad when viewed in connection with the different but complementary analysis attitude (as an ambiguous term for incipient action) undertaken by George Herbert Mead (1938) and I.A. Richards (1959).
(1968: 445)
