The War of Words

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 Here, at last, is the second volume, the until—now unpublished War of Words, where Burke brilliantly exposes the rhetorical devices ...