Editors’ Essay: The Future of Burke Studies

Mark E. Huglen, University of Minnesota, Crookston
Clarke Rountree, University of Alabama, Huntsville

As we hand off editing duties to Andy King at the end of our tenure as inaugural co-editors of KB Journal we believe it is fitting to point toward what we see as the future of the field that Kenneth Burke called “Burkology.” In our “Editors’ Essay: Towards the Next Phase” in the inaugural issue we envisioned the Burkean corpora as a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense of the term, rich with teachings and insights that could be used productively in a manner in which KB envisioned: as operational benchmarks or springboards for further exposition, critique, interpretation, and insight. With several purportedly anomalous limitations emerging throughout the years to challenge the paradigm, we will temper our enthusiasm to provide a realistic yet hopeful vision of the direction for those working the paradigm, based upon past work within the field as a whole, KB Journal publications, and recent doctoral dissertations.

In organizing this essay we immediately thought of Barry Brummett and Anna M. Young’s contribution to KB Journal, “Some Uses of Burke in Communication Studies,” in which they identify three types of Burke scholars: 1) the “extratextual,” when the scholar looks into the biography and historical context of Burke; 2) the “textualcentric,” when the scholar seeks to interpret Burke and Burkean concepts in a hermeneutical, ethical, or organizational manner; and 3) the “seminaltextual,” when the scholar applies Burke’s concepts to contemporary texts for critique. We also reflect on Clarke Rountree’s contribution, “Burke by the Numbers,” which quantifies some trends in Burke studies. Both are good starting points through which to develop an organizing framework for identifying four trends, or at least “leanings” or “drifts” in Burkology today. The first two trends have to do with how Burke is used and the last two trends have to do with who is using Burke.

First, the most obvious and traditional focus draws upon Burke’s original texts in some way, as Brummett and Young’s textualcentric and extratextual categories emphasize. Regarding work in these categories, we may ask about the future of Burke studies: “What is the leaning or drift in regard to the focus upon Burke’s original texts or the historical or biographical context in which Burke worked?” A second use of Burke involves his support for criticism, which Brummett and Young put in the seminaltextual category. We wonder here, “What is the leaning or drift in regard to the focus upon Burke’s teachings for the critique of contemporary texts?” Regarding who is using Burke, we look at two trends: a new “generational drift” that will impact the future of Burkology and an “interdisciplinary drift” in the champions of Burke in various fields.

Original Texts and Biographical and Historical Contexts

What is the leaning or drift in regard to the focus upon Burke’s original texts and the historical and biographical context in which Burke worked? Because we are studying, applying, and appropriating the ideas of a single author this group most readily draws from what is available in print first before exploring Burke’s biographical and historical context. We have been fortunate in recent years to see the publication of new collections of Burke’s letters, his fiction, his late poems, his Shakespeare criticism, and a version of his Symbolic of Motives, with many featured in various forms in KB Journal.

We are fortunate to have a large and rich corpus from which to work. To support continued research, it will be important for the Kenneth Burke Society to ensure that Burke’s works remain readily accessible. The University of California Press and more recently Parlor Press have supported these efforts admirably. If market forces make continued publication problematic, then KBS should make efforts to find new publishers or get permission to publish the books itself.

In any event, we no longer have Burke producing new works, so we will be nearing the end of what can be harvested from the Burkean corpus. This limitation means that scholars may find themselves retracing work done by their predecessors in unpacking and exploring Burke’s rich concepts, so we may eventually reach the point of diminishing returns for our scholarly efforts.

On the other hand, one might view the Burkean oeuvre as containing as many meanings as there are contexts, language chains with ethnographic traces, constraints of persuasive situations, motivations and strategic choices, and people in the world, which means scholars ought to be able to continue unpacking Burkean concepts indefinitely. As Celeste Condit says, “a thousand different perspectives on Burke can be sustained, and at least a hundred have been printed…” (349), so unpacking can continue. She adds that the historical crucible of Burke’s original work—the Great Depression, World War II, and the academic stronghold of B.F. Skinner and John Watson—ensures that new work will need to be done to extend Burke’s ideas and make them applicable to our new world scene. This will take us “post-Burke,” extending Burke’s ideas in ways that change them.

The exchanges among James W. Chesebro, Condit, and Philip Tompkins and George Cheney in the early 1990s address the issue of whether we need to go “post-Burke.” In “Extensions of the Burkeian System” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Chesebro focused on unpacking Burke’s system and identified four limitations, which he labeled monocentric, logocentric, ethnocentric, and methodological. The possibility for addressing those limitations depends, Chesebro argued, “on how Burkeian scholars employ Burke’s works in the years to come” (356). Sixteen years later now in 2008 this qualifies as “the years to come.” What is the leaning or drift in regard to the focus upon Burke’s original texts or the historical or biographical context in which Burke worked in regard to addressing the limitations Chesebro and Condit pointed out in the early 1990s?

In regard to a “monocentric” limitation, Chesebro argued Burke was on a quest to identify one universal method, one systematic vocabulary and universal language system called “dramatism” (357). This quest, according to Chesebro, is reflected by the philosophy of monism: “a form of reductionism which de-emphasizes diversity in order to make broader and more universal generalizations about human communication” (357). Although Clarke Rountree has argued for the universality of dramatism (“Coming to Terms”; “Difficult Notions”), the drift seems to be heading in the other direction, a direction that KB himself has inspired many to take: that not only are ambiguities inevitable but also that there are benefits in ambiguity. Burke’s insights into dialectic, democracy, and constitutions speak more for what Burke was doing than where Chesebro thinks Burke was going. Burke seemed to be heading in many directions. Developing his system may have been an “occupational psychosis” for Burke, but the monism Chesebro talks about was never fully realized.

In regard to a “logocentric” limitation, Chesebro argued that Burke’s word-centered emphasis isolated language from the social context (360). As Tompkins and Cheney explained in 1993 logocentric is a term that associates with Jacques Derrida’s view that the Western world places too much emphasis upon Truth, rationality, and the written word. Tompkins and Cheney’s response was that the field of communication and rhetoric focuses on language and the symbolic–there is nothing new. They contend that the paths Derrida offered seem to have led to dead ends, while the interest in exploring the biography and context surrounding Burke’s texts seems to be growing.

Insight into this drift reveals there are multiple works that focus on the social context. Examples include M. Elizabeth Weiser’s “Burke and War: Rhetoricizing the Theory of Dramatism,” Ross Wolin’s The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke, and James H. East’s The Humane Particulars. All of these explore the context surrounding Burke’s original work to provide greater insight into “Burkology.” In the case of Weiser and Wolin, the authors draw upon the historical context to provide greater insight into Burke’s original work, with Weiser illuminating the impact of World War II on Burke’s A Grammar of Motives and Wolin providing insight into the historical context that spawned Burke’s major works.

Those who write about Burke’s life and times have much more to do. Work by Armin Paul Frank, Jack Selzer, Ann George and others have offered glimpses into Burke’s life and its relationship to his work. But, they have only covered the earliest years of Burke’s life; there is much more to be done on his biography. This project has rich potential; we will see more scholarship in this area, perhaps by Ann and Jack, or their students.

In regard to an “ethnocentric” limitation, Chesebro pointed out that Burke was a White Anglo, heterosexual, Western male (361), particularly pointing to Attitudes Toward History to make the argument. According to Chesebro, Burke’s “Curve of History” reflects a distinctly Western orientation. Chesebro explained Burke’s curve was articulated as movement from “Christian Evangelism,” “Medievel Synthesis,” “Protestant Transition,” and “Naïve Capitalism” to “Emergent Collectivism.” Chesebro notes that Burke had an opportunity to take into account “a profound series of personal and societal changes” before republishing the 1959 and 1984 editions, but did not (361). Like Condit, Chesebro feels the reference points that rationalize Burke’s system are dated (362). We see this as an important area to cultivate for scholarship.

In “Post-Burke: Transcending the Sub-stance of Dramatism,” Condit agrees that Burke did not work from multicultural materials when articulating his claim that “a Dramatistic definition of man requires an admonitory stress upon victimage as the major temptation in the symbol systems by which men build up their ideas, concepts, and images of identity and community” (qtg. Language as Symbolic Action 2, 373; at 352 in Condit). Burke developed this insight by studying Western religion, particularly the Christian religion. Condit’s point is that victimage may be the dominant motive in Western thought and practice but not for all cultures (352). In this way, she argues, Burke is ethnocentric. Condit believes victimage is indeed a useful concept for critique, noting that “[o]ppositional discourses in feminism, African-Americanism, and Marxism flourish because they feed the linguistic craving for victimage so well” (354). Condit would have us critique victimage but move post-Burke to develop new vocabularies that transcend the victimage cycles and reflect alternative views of the world.

In “Spiritual Communication,” published in 2005, Bernard L. Brock took up this call for a reconsideration of victimage and the distinctly Western orientation of the “terms for order” as articulated in Burke’s The Rhetoric of Religion. He referred to this as a “fall-redemption” model of communication, characterized by the familiar “order, pollution, guilt, purification, and redemption” cycle. Alongside this Western model, Brock offered the more eastern orientation called “blessing/growth,” that emphasized activity, affirmation, befriending the negative, creative response/responsibility, and transformation. With roots in Buddhism, the blessing/growth model follows the Eastern tradition that acknowledges continuous change and growth. Others may take up Condit’s call and also consider how widespread the victimage motive and motif operates in human cultures and its alternatives.

In regard to a “methodological” limitation, Chesebro suggested that Burke’s pentad was used too categorically by the casual critic, with the concern that the pentad would be used similar to the neo-Aristotelian method (363). But, as Tompkins and Cheney pointed out in 1993, it is not Burke’s fault that some of his followers misuse the pentad. Plenty of scholars have used Burke’s critical machinery thoughtfully, deftly, and productively. We need not be victims of a Burkean methodological trap.

Recent work in Burke studies demonstrates that there is much more to say about original texts and biographical and social contexts. In KB Journal, notably, the focus is significant. Roberts Wess’s “Representative Anecdotes in General, with Notes toward a Representative Anecdote for Burkean Ecocriticism in Particular” argued that a representative anecdote was a “part of” reality rather than “apart from” reality to explicate views on ecocriticism, antifoundationalism, and foundational ecocriticism. Jo Scott-Coe emphasized Burke’s original work in “Canonical Doubt, Critical Certainty: Counter Conventions in Augustine and Kenneth Burke.” She analyzed the extensive writings of Burke and Augustine to re-address intersections between religion, literary, and critical vocabulary. Erin Wais’s “’Trained Incapacity’: Thorstein Veblen and Kenneth Burke” traced the phrase “trained incapacity” in the work of Burke and Thorsten Veblen, clearing up the confusion whether Veblen coined the phrase and Burke’s more expansive version of it.

Other examples of the focus upon Burke’s original work and the biographical and social context include Rebecca Townsend’s “Widening the Circumference of Scene: Local Politics, Local Metaphysics,” in which she employs the circumference of scene with the ethnography of communication; Keith Gibson’s “Burke, Frazer, and Ritual: Attitudes Towards Attitudes,” which returns to the literary context to understand Burke’s Attitudes Towards History and George Frazer’s The Golden Bough; Timothy Crusius’s “The Question of Kenneth Burke’s Ethics,” in which Crusius explores a theory of comedy with human relations; and Richard H. Thames’s “The Gordian Not: Untangling the Motivorum” (1), which reconstructs Burke’s Symbolic.

Given Burke’s tendency to tease out new ideas only to move on quickly and leave gems for others to pick up later, there’s more work to be done. For example, Rountree picked up on Burke’s brief discussion of “administrative rhetoric” (which is what Burke called Machiavelli’s “rhetorical theory”) to develop an approach to war rhetoric (Rountree, “Building up to War”). Similarly, Brenda K. Kuseski wrote an entire essay on Burke’s brief discussion of “the five dogs” of language, which she then used to analyze a speech by Mother Teresa.

Burkean Criticism

Burke’s work continues to provide an engine for criticism, especially rhetorical criticism. Despite the rise of alternative approaches to analysis in our postmodern academic world, critics still find value in the pentad, identification, terms for order, representative anecdote, perspective by incongruity, and myriad other nuggets mined from the Burke corpus. Publications in our own KB Journal illustrate this nicely.

Robert L. Ivie’s, “The Rhetoric of Bush’s `War’ on Terror,” lead essay in the inaugural issue of KB Journal, is a quintessential example of using Burke’s concepts for critique. Ivie illuminated George W. Bush’s persuasive seductions in regard to the war on terror. Ivie showed how Bush’s messages masqueraded as tests of Christian faith, suggesting that America needed to find its democratic voice.

KB Journal published a dozen other essays focusing on critique, including “The Drama of a Technological Society: Using Kenneth Burke to Symbolically Explore the Technological Worldview of Jacques Ellul” by Mike Hübler; “A Rhetorical Journey into Darkness: Crime-Scene Profiling as Burkean Analysis” by Jennifer MacLennan; “Symbolic Suicide as Mortification, Transformation, and Counterstatement: The Conciliatory (Yet) Resistant Surrender of Maka-tai-mesh-ekia-kiak” by Jason Edward Black; “Sociological Propaganda: A Burkean and Girardian Analysis of Twentieth-Century American Advertising” by Kathleen M. Vandenberg; “Burke, Sociology, and the Example of Cuban Agriculture” by Joshua Frye; “Using Cluster Agon Method to Assess the Radical Potential of `European American’ as a Substitute for `White’” by John Lynch; “Mysticism and Crisis Communication” by Robert S. Littlefield, Timothy L. Sellnow, and Mathew I. Attansey; “Conflicted Possession: A Pentadic Assessment of T.E. Lawrence’s Desert Narrative” by Jason Ingram; “Suicide: or the Future of Medicine (“A Satire by Entelechy” of Biotechnology)” by Eric Shouse; “Fahrenheit 9/11's Purpose-Driven Agents: A Multipentadic Approach to Political Entertainment,” by Samantha Senda-Cook; “Composing a Gourmet Experience: Using Kenneth Burke's Theory of Rhetorical Form,” by Hans Lundquist; and the final chapter of Camille K. Lewis’s book on Bob Jones University.

Whole books on criticism have drawn on Burke for their critical perspective, including, most recently, Greg Clark’s use of identification in Rhetorical Landscapes in America, Camille K. Lewis’s book on Bob Jones University’s rhetoric (see related article in this issue), and Clarke’s 510-page pentadic analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court case that ended the 2000 presidential election and swept George W. Bush into office.

Generational Drift

Despite the continued relevance of Burke and the opportunities for extending and applying Burke in new ways, it appears that the number of publications about Burke has reached a plateau and is waning. As Clarke noted in his “Burke by the Numbers” essay last spring, the trend in Burke studies has been positive over the past few decades. From eight works about Burke and his ideas in the 1920s, the numbers increased exponentially until the 1980s when they exploded with 400 publications, followed by almost 500 in the 1990s, and numbering 336 thus far in the 2000s. Since we have only two years left in this decade, we might expect to fall short of the high mark of the 1990s. That would mean that the number of works about Burke may decrease for the first time in eighty years. While numbers of publications provide a measure of account, we believe it is difficult to account fully for the expansive influence Burke and Burkeans have had in various fields.

Remember the series of editorials penned by Ivie as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech from 1993-1995? Ivie’s editorship capitalized on Burke’s assumptions and teachings, as well as the ideological turn, critical theory, and the postmodern complements. The assumptions were the result of what Burke was teaching for years, but the drift progressed from trying to figure out Burke to using those teachings implicitly as an assumptive framework. While the number of specific works about Burke may indicate a potential decline for this decade by 2010, KB’s influence is more far reaching now than at any other time.

Obviously, we’re not talking about a natural process here. On one hand, a focus on Burke studies is something scholars can choose to take up or not; on the other hand: being born into an intellectual tradition is something potential scholars cannot choose. The language of tradition will prefigure reality and use scholars until there are breakthroughs for effective change. Early Burke scholars had to figure out Burke and forge a place in the primarily Aristotelian assumptive framework of the field. Today Burke scholars function within a framework that provides the prevailing assumptions for the field. In one way of thinking the Kenneth Burke Society and this journal can help promote or fail to promote Burke’s teachings, but in another way of thinking Burke’s teachings have survived and will survive without any overt promotion because, if we listen to Burke, the teachings and the works about Burke will use its members within assumptive frameworks more than its members will use Burke in particular.

Yet we need voices that encourage us to listen to Burke, and we are experiencing a notable drift with the current passing of a generation of scholars whose numbers and standing in their own disciplines helped to raise the stature of Burke as a major scholar. Sociologist Hugh Dalziel Duncan died in 1970, and Burke’s best friend, Malcolm Cowley (who has five works related to Burke), died in 1989. In the current decade we’ve lost that great literary critic and Burke interlocutor, Wayne C. Booth; the “Dean of Burke studies,” Bill Rueckert; a friend whose scholarly work and rhetorical criticism textbook (with Bob Scott initially, adding Jim Chesebro later) brought Burke to the attention of communication students, Bernie Brock; a scholar who first applied Burke to social movements, Leland Griffin; and Dick Gregg, a communication professor who wrote a couple of masterful essays on Burke. Other major Burke scholars are retired or have moved to emeriti status, such as Joseph R. Gusfield, Phil Tompkins, W. Ross Winterowd, Hayden White, Dell Hymes, and Don Jennerman. A number of other leading Burke scholars began writing about Burke in the 1970s and may retire soon.

Despite these significant losses at least 14 major Burke scholars (those with five Burke related publications or more—see Rountree, “Burke by the Numbers”) began publishing on Burke in the 1980s and have a decade or two (or perhaps more) before leaving the scholarly stage, namely, Ed Appel, Cheree Carlson, Rick Coe, Greig Henderson, Phyllis Japp, Paul Jay, Andy King, Mark Moore, Clarke Rountree, Richard Thames, Tilly Warnock, Bob Wess, and David Cratis Williams. And the numbers indicate we have a cadre of major scholars, again fitting the criterion of five Burke-related publications or more, who began publishing after the 1980s, including Gregory Clark, Bryan Crable, Ann George, Debra Hawhee, Mark E. Huglen, and Kathleen M. Vandenberg. And several bright newcomers promise to make great contributions, including Dana Anderson, Scott Newstok, and M. Elizabeth Weiser, among others.

Among those newcomers who might carry on this work are the authors of recent Burke-related dissertations profiled in this issue of KB Journal. Their work offers grounds for optimism for the future of Burke studies. Out of the fourteen dissertations profiled, seven can be characterized as focusing upon Burke’s original works as textualcentric or extratextual, with the other seven using Burke’s concepts for doing a critique—a nice balance for continuing Burke’s work.

Interdisciplinary Drift

The dissertations also reflect a second drift worth exploring: the disciplines that are taking up Burke. For the fourteen profiled here, Literature and Communication departments spawned six each, with one coming from art history and another from occupational therapy. This generally fits trends noted by Clarke in “Burke by the Numbers.” While a wide range of disciplines have applied Burke—from architecture to religious studies to business studies to art, not to mention speech and literature—most disciplines lack a critical mass of scholars studying Burke to make him a significant force in their fields. Communication Studies continues to be the most significant torchbearer for Burke, along with the allied interdisciplinary field of rhetorical studies (which brings in speech, composition, and literature scholars particularly). Rhetoric and composition has a number of voices, including Tilly Warnock, David Blakesley, and Phillip K. Arrington. Although there are significant scholars in literature who study Burke, the field is so large that someone like Peter Holbrook could ask in the Times Literary Supplement last year, “What happened to Burke?” The comment reflects an attitude of declining interest, although Clarke’s “Burke by the Numbers” seems to suggest that literature scholars still draw on Burke.

The shortage of major scholars is more severe in other disciplines. Importantly, in sociology, no one has emerged as a champion of Burke on the order of a Hugh Duncan or a Joseph Gusfield, though Robert Wade Kenny, Robert Perinbanayagam, and Michael A. Overington have made significant contributions. Political Science never had a leading Burke scholar, though the late Murray Edelman, Dan Nimmo, and James E. Combs often worked in the spirit of Burke, referencing him occasionally. Mary Stuckey, who is Professor of Communication and Political Science at Georgia State University, carries on this tradition, using Burke occasionally (especially in “The Battle of Issues and Images” with Fred Antczak). Other fields feature lone Burkean voices. Hayden White (now emeritus) is the only historian of note to draw significantly from Burke. Philosophy has David Hildebrand, though he is supported by a range of philosophically-oriented scholars from other fields who draw on Burke (often publishing in Philosophy & Rhetoric). Linguistics has Dell Hymes (now emeritus). But one would be hard-pressed to identify a single notable Burke scholar from the disciplines of American Studies, anthropology, architecture, art or art history, business, education, the natural sciences, psychology, or religion.

Generally, it appears that Burke Studies is safe in communication, composition, and rhetorical studies. It will require continued education from the notable Burke scholars in literary studies to ensure their colleagues that Burke is not dead in their field. As for other fields, we will have to keep encouraging the interests of our colleagues in Burke, though perhaps those drawn to the rhetorical turn in their fields will eventually find their way to Burke.

Beyond disciplinary boundaries, it appears we must do more to cultivate Burke outside of North America. If U.S. and Canadian scholars still turn to Burke, this is not the case in Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, or Australia. There have been a fair number of translations of Burke’s works, including The Philosophy of Literary Form (German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese), A Grammar of Motives (Japanese), On Symbols and Society (Japanese), The Rhetoric of Religion (Spanish), and various essays (German, Danish, and many others). But, it does not appear that many international scholars draw on or study Burke for the purpose of publication. British scholar Laurence Coupe is an exception, with several Burke-related publications. A special issue of Recherches Anglaises et Americaines in 1979 (Susuni) marks a significant (if one-time) spurt of interest in Burke by European scholars.

Generally, during the 1970s international scholars had largely ignored Burke, but there is hope: Our online tracking for KB Journal indicates that readers from every inhabited continent and dozens of countries have perused our pages (see charts below). And, we end our editorship by publishing our first essay by a European scholar, Hans Lindquist of Lund University in Sweden.

The Past and Future Impact of KB Journal

As the flagship journal of the Kenneth Burke Society, KB Journal has played an important role in advancing Burkean scholarship, as we suggest in this essay. It has also been one of the first journals in communication or English studies to publish under the open access model so that all of our articles are freely accessible to readers around the world. Each article is also published under a Creative Commons license, which means that they may be redistributed or reprinted without the usual permissions issues that normally dampen wide distribution of new scholarly work. We believe that the CC license is very much in the spirit of open and active inquiry that Kenneth Burke himself practiced with his own work. Many of his correspondents were treated with copies of his latest poetry or, in some cases, full (and as yet unpublished) manuscripts, such as Poetics, Dramatistically Considered.

Based on our analysis of tracking data, we know that people from around the world have read KB Journal articles, in numbers that many will find surprising. Since June, 2007, our pages have been hit more than 500,000 times, with the monthly average between 40,000 and 60,000 hits, as shown in Table 1, generated by Webalizer.

Table 1. Summary by month of Web stats for KB Journal from June 2007 to April 2008.

What is perhaps more interesting is to see how far KB Journal reaches across the globe, perhaps an indicator that the reach we hope to see and that we discussed earlier may have begun. Table 2 shows hits to the website by country of origin, for November 2007, not long after the release of the Fall 2007 issue.

Table 2. Hits to the KB Journal website by country of origin for November 2007.

Behind the U.S. are Canada, Australia, the European Union, Belgium and the UK, which together account for another few thousand hits per month. Combined with the numerous emails from international scholars received by the editors, this data suggests that KB Journal is extending the reach of Burkean scholarship and will continue to do so.

Readers of particular articles can track how many times a particular article has been read by noticing the “Reads” counter at the bottom of each article. Among the most popular pages at the site are the Burke bibliographies and two articles, Erin Wais’s “`Trained Incapacity’: Thorstein Veblen and Kenneth Burke” (8,170 reads) and Paul Lynch’s review of Keith D. Millers’s article, “Plymouth Rock Landed on Us: Malcolm X’s Whiteness Theory as a Basis for Alternative Literacy” (2,565 reads).

As we move to the next stage in the journal’s evolution under the editorship of Andy King, two new Web developers and editors join the team as well and will have an important role to play in distinguishing the future of KB Journal. Ryan Weber and Nathaniel Rivers—winners of the Emerging Scholar Award at KBS 2005—take over from David Blakesley and will no doubt help give the tenor of the argument its new pitch.

Given the drifts and leanings discussed here, we have reason to hope that the teachings of Kenneth Burke will continue to provide value to scholars and will be extended in ways even Burke did not anticipate. We are confident that our successors will help make the future of Burke studies bright.

*The authors thank David Blakesley for the information on website usage.

Works Cited

Black, Jason Edward "Symbolic Suicide as Mortification, Transformation, and Counterstatement: The Conciliatory (yet) Resistant Surrender of Maka-Tai-Mesh-Ekia-Kiak." KB Journal 2.1 (2005).

Brock, Bernard L. (Ed.). Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: Rhetoric in Transition. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Brock, Bernard L. "Spiritual Communication." Review of Communication 5.2-3 (2005): 88-99.

Brummett, Barry, and Anna M. Young. “Some Uses of Burke in Communication Studies.” KB Journal 2.2 (2006).

Chesebro, James W. “Extending the Burkeian System: A Response to Tompkins and Cheney.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80.1 (1994): 83-90.

---. “Extensions of the Burkeian System.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78.3 (1992): 356-78.

Clark, Gregory. Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

Condit, Celeste Michelle. “Post-Burke: Transcending the Sub-stance of Dramatism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78.3 (1992): 349-55.

Coupe, Laurence. Kenneth Burke on Myth: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2004.

---. "Kenneth Burke: Pioneer of Ecocriticism." Journal of American Studies 35.3 (2001): 413-31.

---. Myth. London: Routledge, 1997.

---. "Myth without Mystery: The Project of Robert Segal." Religious Studies Review 29 (2003): 3-17.

Crusius, Timothy W. "The Question of Kenneth Burke's Ethics." KB Journal 3.1 (2006).

East, James H. (Ed.). The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

Frank, Armin Paul. Kenneth Burke. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969.

George, Ann, and Jack Selzer. Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.

Frye, Joshua. "Burke, Socioecology, and the Example of Cuban Agriculture." KB Journal 2.2 (2006).

Gibson, Keith. "Burke, Frazer, and Ritual: Attitudes toward Attitudes." KB Journal 3.1 (2006).

Holbrook, Peter. "What Happened to Burke? How a Lionized American Critic, for Whom Literature Was "Equipment for Living," Became Lost to Posterity." TLS July 13, 2007 2007: 11-12.

Hubler, Mike. "The Drama of a Technological Society: Using Kenneth Burke to Symbolically Explore the Technological Worldview Discovered by Jacques Ellul." KB Journal 1.2 (2005).

Ingram, Jason. "Conflicted Possession: A Pentadic Assessment of T.E. Lawrence’s Desert Narrative." KB Journal 4.1 (2007).

Ivie, Robert L. "The Rhetoric of Bush's 'War' on Evil." KB Journal 1.1 (2004).

Ivie, Robert L.  "Where Are We Headed?" Quarterly Journal of Speech 79.4 (1993).

---.  "The Performance of Rhetorical Knowledge." Quarterly Journal of Speech 80.2 (1994).

---.  "A Question of Significance." Quarterly Journal of Speech 80.4 (1994).

---.  "Scrutinizing Performances of Rhetorical Criticism." Quarterly Journal of Speech 80.3 (1994).

Kuseski, Brenda K. “Kenneth Burke's 'Five Dogs' And Mother Teresa's Love.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74.3 (August 1988): 323-33.

Lewis, Camille K. "Publish and Perish?: My Fundamentalist Education from the Inside Out." KB Journal 4.2 (2008).

---. Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007.

Littlefield, Robert S., Timothy L. Sellnow, and Matthew I. Attansey. "Mysticism and Crisis Communication: The Use of Ambiguity as a Strategy by the Roman Catholic Church in Response to the 2004 Tsunami." KB Journal 3.1 (2006).

Lindquist, Hans. “Composing a Gourmet Experience: Using Kenneth Burke’s Theory of Rhetorical Form.” KB Journal 4.2 (2008).

Lynch, John. "Race and Radical Renamings: Using Cluster Agon Method to Assess the Radical Potential of “European American” as a Substitute for “White”." KB Journal 2.2 (2006).

MacLennan, Jennifer "A Rhetorical Journey into Darkness: Crime-Scene Profiling as Burkean Analysis." KB Journal 1.2 (2005).

Rountree, Clarke. “Building up to War: Bush’s ‘Administrative Rhetoric’ in the Persian Gulf Conflict.” The Speech Communication Annual 10 (Spring 1996): 5-19.

---. “`Burke by the Numbers: Observations on Nine Decades of Scholarship on Burke.’” KB Journal 3.2 (Spring 2007).

---. “Coming to Terms with Kenneth Burke’s Pentad.” American Communication Journal 1.3 (1998). www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol1/iss3/burke/rountree.html

---. “Difficult Notions: Dramatism as Literal.” Paper presented to the Kenneth Burke Interest Group at the Annual Convention of the Southern Speech Communication Association, Savannah, GA, April 2008.

---. Judging the Supreme Court: Constructions of Motives in Bush v. Gore. Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 2007.

Scott-Coe, Jo. "Canonical Doubt, Critical Certainty: Counter-Conventions in Augustine and Kenneth Burke." KB Journal 1.1 (2004).

Selzer, Jack. Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-1931. The Wisconsin Project on American Writers. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Senda-Cook, Samantha. “Fahrenheit 9/11’s Purpose-Driven Agents.” KB Journal 4.2 (2008).

Shouse, Eric. "Suicide: Or the Future of Medicine (a “Satire by Entelechy” of Biotechnology)." KB Journal 4.1 (2007).

Stuckey, Mary E. and Frederick J. Antczak. "The Batttle of Issues and Images: Establishing Interpretive Dominance." Communication Quarterly 42 (1994): 120-32.

Susini, Christian, ed. "Special Issue on Burke." Recherches Anglaises et Americaines No.12 (1979).

Thames, Richard H. "The Gordian Not: Untangling the Motivorum." KB Journal 3.2 (2007).

Tompkins, Phillip K., and George Cheney. “On the Limits and Sub-stance of Kenneth Burke and His Critics.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 225-231.

Townsend, Rebecca. "Widening the Circumference of Scene: Local Politics, Local Metaphysics." KB Journal 2.2 (2006).

Vandenberg, Kathleen M. . "Sociological Propaganda: A Burkean and Girardian Analysis of Twentieth-Century American Advertising." KB Journal 2.1 (2005).

Wais, Erin ""Trained Incapacity": Thorstein Veblen and Kenneth Burke." KB Journal 2.1 (2005).

Weiser, M. Elizabeth. “Burke and War: Rhetoricizing the Theory of Dramatism.” Rhetoric Review 26.3 (2007): 286-302.

Wess, Robert. "Representative Anecdotes in General, with Notes toward a Representative Anecdote for Burkean Ecocriticism in Particular." KB Journal 1.1 (2004).

Wolin, Ross. The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

Creative Commons License
Editors’ Essay: The Future of Burke Studies by Mark E. Huglen and Clarke Rountree is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.kbjournal.org.