A Rhetoric of Motives

As critic, Kenneth Burke's preoccupations were at the beginning purely esthetic and literary; but after Counter—Statement (1931), he began to discriminate a "rhetorical" or persuasive component in literature, and thereupon became a philosopher of language and human conduct.

In A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), Burke's conception of "symbolic action" comes into its own: all human activities—linguisitc or extra—linguistic—are modes of symbolizing; man is defined as ...