Year: 1991
Type: article
Abstract: The work of Kenneth Burke has a persistent even though limited impact on the social sciences. He has never been recognized as one of the major theorists of sociology yet for decades has deeply influenced anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. Structuralism, linguistic analysis, critical theory, symbolic anthropology and cognitive sociology have all focused from one or another angle on Burke’s specific themes : an understanding of social action as dramatic in forme, language being of central importance in such a theory, the development of a rhetoric built around the complementary roles of the performer and his audience, the performative character of human action. While Burke’s first readers were theorists and literary critics, his dialectical method and the theory of dramatism” he developed in the 1930s and 1940s is now being applied in much empirical research. In this paper Joseph Gusfield considers how Burke has in effect undermined the traditional frontiers between literature and social science and succeeded in erecting a “bridge over separated lands”.
Source: Hermès
DOI: 10.4267/2042/15303
Author: Joseph R. Gusfield
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1508100320