Definition
Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) was an American literary and social critic, largely self-taught, whose work is the most original American contribution to 20th-century rhetorical theory. His principal books — A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and Language as Symbolic Action (1966) — extended rhetorical analysis beyond formal oratory into literature, advertising, political ideology, and everyday discourse.
Burke's central concept is dramatism: the view that human action is best understood by analogy with drama, and that language is not just a medium for action but a form of action in its own right — symbolic action. He distinguished motion (what objects do) from action (what symbol-using agents do) and treated all serious cultural analysis as a study of the motives behind symbolic acts. His best-known analytical tool is the pentad — act, scene, agent, agency, purpose — a five-term grid for parsing any human action by asking what was done, where and when, by whom, by what means, and to what end.
Why it matters
How it works
Burke's pentad operates by ratio: any explanation of an action implicitly privileges one term over the others, and the choice reveals the analyst's framework. A scene-act ratio explains behaviour by environment ('it was the times'); an agent-act ratio explains it by character ('he was that kind of man'); an agency-purpose ratio explains it by means and ends ('to get the job done he used whatever tools were available'). Identifying the dominant ratio in a piece of rhetoric exposes the worldview it assumes.
His doctrine of identification is equally influential. Persuasion, on Burke's view, succeeds not when one mind defeats another but when the audience comes to see the speaker as one of their own — sharing values, attitudes, fates. The classical ethos was about being credible; Burke's identification is about fusing identities, however partially. The move shifted rhetorical analysis decisively toward questions of community, belonging, and ideology that dominate the field today.