Language as Symbolic Action

Burke, Kenneth

doi:10.1525/9780520340664

Cited by 1,416 publications

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“…Each pairing of terms in the pentad provides a different way of directing our attention to a different screen for viewing the drama or story. Burke's (1966) pairing of terms offers at least 10 different ratios or pairs for opening up an analyst's perspective: Scene:Act, Scene:Agent, Scene:Agency, Scene:Purpose, Act:Purpose, Act:Agent, Act:Agency, Agent:Purpose, Agent:Agency, and Agency:Purpose. The power of Burke's narrative analysis lies in these pentadic ratios.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pentadic Cartography: Mapping Postpartum Psychosis Narratives

Beck

2020

Qual Health Res

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Writing online narratives of postpartum psychosis allows both self-analysis and catharsis and can also be viewed as a type of sociopolitical expression. Eight narratives posted on the Action on Postpartum Psychosis website were analyzed using Burke’s narrative analysis. This method focuses on a pentad of key elements of story: scene, act, purpose, agent, and agency. What drives this narrative analysis is the identification of problematic areas referred to as ratio imbalances between any two of these five terms. The ratio imbalance between Agent and Act appeared most often in these eight narratives. The agent was the mother and the act most often was either her hallucinations or delusions. The second most frequent area of tension was between Scene and Agent. Problematic scenes for the agent (mother) involved admission to the psychiatric ward, entering the electroconvulsive therapy room, or nighttime. These ratio imbalances pinpoint places where clinicians can target specific interventions.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pentadic Cartography: Mapping Postpartum Psychosis Narratives

Beck

2020

Qual Health Res

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“…146 His aesthetic subconscious had finally avowed the Platonic logic of his realism. 147 In his first essay for The Dial, Burke had quoted Remy de Gourmont: "Man is not at the pinnacle of nature; he is in nature." 148 Not only were we natural, but Burke saw language and its relational metaphysics as natural and natural to us; they were our method and our medium.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's in a Name? Twentieth-Century Realism in Kenneth Burke's Aesthetics

Burg

2015

Mod. Intell. Hist.

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Admired throughout the twentieth century by literary and sociological theorists but long neglected by philosophers, readers have overlooked Kenneth Burke's theoretical dependence on American philosophic realism, thus missing consistent patterns of his insight. By tracing Burke's own realism back to his year at Columbia University and his time atThe Dialmagazine, we see how Burke's earliest aesthetic theories conformed to aspects of the new realist movement. During the Depression, in his bookPermanence and Change, he followed earlier new realists in arguing for a reconstructed modern teleology of “purpose” and incorporated realism within his pleas for a suppler Communist Party rhetoric than that sanctioned by the party leadership. Burke's apparently inconsistent positions can be understood as a continuous philosophical argument for realism within changing intellectual contexts, explaining his long-lived cross-disciplinary appeal and influence. Burke maintained central realistic tenets: (1) the independent existence and intelligibility of an external world and (2) the substantive meaning of universals, particularly a common human nature. Examining these connections informs our readings of Burke while illuminating one reverberation of the philosophical “new realists” in American intellectual culture. Burke expressed realist principles in his presentation of symbolic action and dramatism inThe Philosophy of Literary FormandA Grammar of Motives, both published in the 1940s. His sophisticated aesthetic–linguistic realism appeared in his arguments against logical empiricists and New Critics, which displayed an arc of transformation in the philosophical and critical culture before World War II from a still-contested mixture to an emphatically nominalistic, antirealist one. It was from this philosophical position that Burke offered his lively, penetrating analyses of and challenges to many of the major movements in twentieth-century philosophy: realism, pragmatism, positivism, and post-structuralism.

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“…This stabilizes mainstream sports while diminishing damaging truths of injury, drug abuse, and death. Noting Burke (1966), defining by way of the negative places extreme sports in a space of insufficiency, deviance, or failure. As many exclude extreme athletes from mainstream sports or society, it is important to read these athletes and spectators in the context of marginalizing processes.…”

Section: Defining Extreme Sportmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to Fail: Adolescent Resistance in Extreme Sports

Gieseler

2019

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

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Employing dysfunctional or arrested development, extreme sports tricksters cultivate diverse strategies of sporting identity. Through parody, satire, and mockery, adolescent performances and representations resist hegemonic ideologies of mainstream sports masculinity. This work interrogates the representational and performative texts, events, and bodies of extreme sports using queer theories and psychoanalytic approaches. To assess failure as a potentially strategic and radical mode of counter-hegemonic resistance, I trace the origins of extreme sports cultures through icons such as Evel Knievel and the Dangerous Sports Club. I also look at a modern heir apparent—action sporting collective Nitro Circus. In failing at mainstream sporting masculinities, these athletes create different ways of being and doing sport through commoditization, adolescence, gender, Whiteness, corporeality, and death.

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Language as Symbolic Action

Cited by 1,416 publications

References 0 publications

Pentadic Cartography: Mapping Postpartum Psychosis Narratives

Pentadic Cartography: Mapping Postpartum Psychosis Narratives

What's in a Name? Twentieth-Century Realism in Kenneth Burke's Aesthetics

Learning to Fail: Adolescent Resistance in Extreme Sports

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