Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, Third edition

by Kenneth Burke

Overview

Permanence and Change was written and first published in the depths of the Great Depression. Attitudes Toward History followed it two years later. These were revolutionary texts in the theory of communication, and, as classics, they retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, whereas Attitudes Towards History characterizes tactics and patterns of conflict typical of actual human associations. It is in Permanence and Change that Burke establishes in path-breaking fashion that form permeates society just as it does poetry and the arts. Hence, his master idea that forms of art are not exclusively aesthetic: the cycles of a storm, the gradations of a sunrise, the stages of an epidemic, the undoing of Prince Hamlet are all instances of progressive form.
 
This new edition of Permanence and Change reprints Hugh Dalziel Duncan's long sociological introduction and includes a substantial new afterward in which Burke reexamines his early ideas in light of subsequent developments in his own thinking and in social theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520041462
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/23/1984
Edition description:	Third Edition, With new Afterword
Pages:	396
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kenneth Burke has been termed "simply the finest literary critic in the world, and perhaps the finest since Coleridge" (Stanley Edgar Hyman, The New Leader). Mr. Burke has published ten other works with the University of California Press: Towards a Better Life (1966); Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (1966) Collected Poems, 1915-1967 (1968); The Complete White Oxen: Collected Short Fiction of Kenneth Burke (1968); A Grammar of Motives (1969); Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1984); The Philosophy of Literary Form (1974); A Rhetoric of Motives (1969); The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1970); and Attitudes Toward History, Third Edition (1984).

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE

PART I
ON INTERPRETATION

CHAPTER I: ORIENTATION
All Living Things Are Critics
Veblen's Concept of "Trained Incapacity"
Training, Means-Selecting, and Escape
The Pavlov, Watson, and Gestalt Experiments in Meaning
The Scapegoat as an Error in Interpretation
Connection between Rationalization and Orientation

CHAPTER II: MOTIVES
Motives Are Subdivisions in a Larger Frame of Meaning
The Pleasure Principle in Orientation
The Strategy of Motives
Further Consideration of Motive as Part of a Larger Whole
Motives Are Shorthand Terms for Situations

CHAPTER III: OCCUPATIONAL PSYCHOSIS
The Nature of Interest
Occupational Psychoses of the Present
The Technological Psychosis
Effects upon Literature
Occupational Psychosis as Trained Incapacity

CHAPTER IV: STYLE
The Essence of Stylistic Appeal
Various Romantic Solutions
The Need for Definition

CHAPTER V: MAGIC, RELIGION, AND SCIENCE
The Three Orders of Rationalization
A Humanistic, or Poetic, Rationalization

PART II
PERSPECTIVE BY INCONGRUITY

CHAPTER I: THE RANGE OF PIETY
Magical and Utilitarian Meanings
Piety As a System-builder

CHAPTER II: NEW MEANINGS
The Factor of Impiety in Evangelism
Necessitous and Symbolic Labor
Reservations Concerning Logic
Piety-impiety Conflict in Nietzsche

CHAPTER III: PERSPECTIVE AS METAPHOR
Illustrations of Perspective by Incongruity
Planned Incongruity in Bergson
The Function of Metaphor

CHAPTER IV: ARGUMENT BY ANALOGY
Analogy and Proof
Tests of Success
Classification Dictated by Interest
Interrelation of Analogy, Metaphor, Abstraction,
Classification, Interest, Expectancy, and Intention
The Search for Analogous Processes
An Incongruous Assortment of Incongruities

CHAPTER V: SECULAR CONVERSIONS
The Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis
McDougall's Modifications of Freudianism
Exorcism by Misnomer
Examination of a Case Described by Rivers
Conversion and the Lex Continui

CHAPTER VI: MEANING AND REGRESSION
Pure, or Unmixed, Responses
Conversion and Regression in Religion
CONCLUSION
A Historical Parallel
Towards a Philosophy of Being

PART III
THE BASIS OF SIMPLIFICATION

CHAPTER I: CAUSALITY AND COMMUNICATION
Major Shifts in Perspective
The Rock of Certainty
Two Aspects of Speech

CHAPTER II: PERMANENCE AND CHANGE
Modern Parallels to Ancient Thought

CHAPTER III: SECULAR MYSTICISM IN BENTHAM
Bentham's "Table of the Springs of Action"

CHAPTER IV: THE ETHICAL CONFUSION
Recommending by Tragedy
The Peace-war Conflict
Critique of Veblen's Solution
Egoistic-altruistic Merger
Ethicizing of the Means of Support
Variants of the Ethicizing Tendency
The "Pathetic Fallacy"

CHAPTER V: THE SEARCH FOR MOTIVES
Magical and Scientific Interpretation
Statistical Motives
Where Scientists and Mystics Meet
The Basis of Reference
The Part and the Whole
Outlines of a "Metabiology"

CHAPTER VI: OCCUPATION AND PREOCCUPATION
Extending the Concept of Occupation
Ambivalence of Weakness and Prowess

CHAPTER VII: THE POETRY OF ACTION
The Mystic's Sterilization of Combat
In Qualified Defense of Lawrence
Recalcitrance

CONCLUSIONS

APPENDIX
On Human Behavior, Considered "Dramatistically"

AFTERWORD
Permanence and Change: In Retrospective
Prospect