Kenneth Burke’s Dramatistic Pragmatism: A Missing Link between Classical Greek Scholarship and the Interactionist Study of Human Knowing and Acting

Authors

  • Robert Prus University of Waterloo, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.13.2.01

Keywords:

Kenneth Burke, Dramatistic Pragmatism, Classical Greek Scholarship, Symbolic Interaction, Rhetoric, Dramatistic Sociology, Knowing and Acting, Aristotle, Cicero, Erving Goffman

Abstract

The term “rhetoric” often has been maligned by those lacking familiarity with classical Greek and Latin scholarship. However, a more sustained, historically-informed examination of persuasive interchange is of fundamental importance for the study of human knowing and acting across the humanities and social sciences, as well as all other realms of community life.

While acknowledging several contemporary scholars who have reengaged aspects of classical Greek and Latin rhetoric, this statement gives particular attention to the works of Kenneth Burke and the linkages of Burke’s writings with Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as well as American pragmatist thought and the ethnographically, conceptually-oriented sociology known as symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1969; Strauss 1993; Prus 1996; 1997; 1999; 2015; Prus and Grills 2003).

Because scholarship does not exist as isolated instances of genius, even the productions of highly accomplished individuals such as Kenneth Burke are best understood within the context of a horizontal- temporal, as well as a vertical-historical intellectual community. Accordingly, Burke’s contributions to the human sciences more generally and pragmatist social theory (along with its sociological extension, symbolic interaction) more specifically are best comprehended within this broader, historically-enabled scholarly context.

Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pragmatism is not the only missing link between classical Greek thought and symbolic interactionism, but Burke’s work on rhetoric represents a particularly important medium for extending the conceptual and analytic parameters of contemporary symbolic interaction. Indeed, Kenneth Burke’s scholarship has important implications for the fuller study of community life as implied in the most fundamental and enabling terms of human knowing and acting.

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Author Biography

Robert Prus, University of Waterloo, Canada

Robert Prus is a sociologist (Professor Emeritus) at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. A symbolic interactionist, ethnographer, and social theorist, Robert Prus has been examining the conceptual and methodological connections of American pragmatist philosophy and its sociological offshoot, symbolic interactionism, with Classical Greek, Latin, and interim scholarship. In addition to his work on the developmental flows of pragmatist social thought in rhetoric, he also has been studying the flows of Western social thought in the interrelated areas of poetics (fictional representations), philosophy, ethnohistory, religion, education and scholarship, love and friendship, politics and governing practices, and deviance and morality. As part of a larger venture, Robert Prus also has been analyzing a fuller range of texts produced by Emile Durkheim (most notably Durkheim’s later, but lesser known, works on morality, education, religion and philosophy), mindfully of their pragmatist affinities with Aristotle’s foundational emphasis on the nature of human knowing and acting as well as Blumerian symbolic interactionism.

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2017-04-30

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Prus, R. (2017). Kenneth Burke’s Dramatistic Pragmatism: A Missing Link between Classical Greek Scholarship and the Interactionist Study of Human Knowing and Acting. Qualitative Sociology Review, 13(2), 6–58. https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.13.2.01

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