Kenneth Duva Burke was a philosopher and literary theorist American. His main fields of study were the Rhetoric and Aesthetics.
He studied at Ohio State University and later at Columbia University (1916-1917), giving up to become a writer. In Greenwich Village had contact with the vanguard of American artists such as Hart Crane, Cowley, Gorham Munson and Allen Tate. Created Catholic family became agnostic.
Influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche devoted to the works of Shakespeare. Important thinkers of the twentieth century state their influences: Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, Susan Sontag, his students at the University of Chicago, and Erving Goffman.
Burke devoted himself to the study of rhetoric as a form of service to humanity. Burke calls this drama analysis (dramatism)
In his book Language to Symbolic Action (1966), Burke defines man as an animal that uses symbols. This statement shows the "reality" as being constructed from the symbolic system.
Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written / told by Kenneth.
"Creation implies authority in the sense of originator. The possibility of a 'Fall' is implied in a Covenant insofar as the idea of a Covenant implies the possibility of its being violated"
"Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality"
"We not only interpret the character of events... we may also interpret our interpretations"
"Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language"
"For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classification of status"