ABSTRACT
Burke’s search model, the pentad, helps critics systematically describe and analyze rhetorical events using a vocabulary that facilitates insightful explanation of rhetoric. We explain the prior notion of the negative as the quality of symbolic interaction that creates the social structures that are the exigences for rhetoric and the outcomes of rhetoric. We explore the complex relationships between the negative, its creation of division/identification, and its creation of hierarchies that provoke material and symbolic action, and we explore how to identify pentadic ratios and the rhetorical motives they expose.
As we have in previous chapters, we provide ample examples of application of Burke’s ideas using the Gettysburg Address and Smackdown!
