"'What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book.'"--Mr. Burke, as quoted on the cover.

This volume contains the work Burke planned to include in the third book in his Motivorum trilogy. Following Rueckert's Introduction, Burke lays out his approach in essays that theorize and illustrate the method, which he considered essential for understanding language as symbolic action and human relations generally.

When Kenneth Burke conceived his celebrated “Motivorum” project in the 1940s and 1950s, he envisioned it in three parts. Whereas the third part, A Symbolic of Motives, was never finished, A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) have become canonical theoretical documents. A Rhetoric of Motives was originally intended to be a two-part book. Here, at last, is the second volume, the until-now unpublished War of Words, where Burke brilliantly exposes the rhetorical devices that sponsor war in the name of peace. Discouraging militarism during the Cold War even as it catalogues belligerent persuasive strategies and tactics that remain in use today, The War of Words reveals how popular news media outlets can, wittingly or not, foment international tensions and armaments during tumultuous political periods. This authoritative edition includes an introduction from the editors explaining the compositional history and cultural contexts of both The War of Words and A Rhetoric of Motives. The War of Words illuminates the study of modern rhetoric even as it deepens our understanding of post–World War II politics.

From the Preface: The title for this collection was the title of a course in literary criticism that I gave for many years at Bennington College. And much of the material presented here was used in that course. The title should serve well to convey the gist of these various pieces. For all of them are explicitly concerned with the attempt to define and track down the implications of the term "symbolic action," and to show how the marvels of literature and language look when considered form that point of view. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968. From the Preface: The title for this collection was the title of a course in literary criticism that I gave for many years at Bennington College. And much of the material presented here was used in that course. The title should serve well to convey the gi

This portrays an extraordinary literary friendship, unique in American letters for its longevity, and it chronicles the lives and events that helped shape modern literature and criticism.

Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change, written by American literary theorist Kenneth Burke, was first published in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression. Burke followed this with Attitudes Toward History followed just two years later. His texts proved to be revolutionary in the theory of communication, and, as classics, retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, and in this book, Burke establishes, in ground-breaking fashion, that form permeates society, just as it does poetry and the arts. This present volume is the Second Edition, first published in 1954, and includes an Introduction by Hugh Dalziel Duncan. “Unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America.”—W. H. Auden “One of the truly speculative American thinkers of his era.”—Malcolm Cowley “The foremost critic of our time and perhaps the greatest critic since Coleridge.”—Stanley Edgar Hyman “What Burke has done better than anyone else is to find a way of connecting literature to life without reducing either. He’s had far less attention than he deserves because he’d been so far ahead of his time. But he’s one of the major minds of the twentieth century, and he’s sure to be read in the future.”—Wayne Booth

About this book Mr. Burke contributes an introductory and summarizing remark, "What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives. These forms of thought can be embodied profoundly or trivially, truthfully or falsely. They are equally present in systematically elaborated or metaphysical structures, in legal judgments, in poetry and fiction, in political and scientific works, in news and in bits of gossip offered at random."

A valuable feature of the second edition (1953) of Counter-Statement was the Curriculum Criticum in which the author placed the book in terms of his later work. For this new paperback edition, Mr. Burke continues his "curve of development" in an Addendum which surveys the course of his though in subsequent books (up to the publication of his Collected Poems, 1915 - 1967) and work-in-progress.