Book: The Philosophy of Literary Form

Overview
Kenneth Burke argues that literature and language are best understood as forms of symbolic action rather than mere aesthetic ornament or transparent representation. He shifts attention from isolated stylistic features to the ways a text structures motives, relationships, and social attitudes through its formal choices. The book reframes literary form as an instrument for exploring human motives and communal life, insisting that rhetoric and poetics are inseparable dimensions of how people make sense of their experience.

Dramatism and Symbolic Action
Burke introduces a dramatistic perspective that treats human behavior as if it were staged: acts take place within scenes, agents use means, and purposes orient conduct. Language becomes a form of action that dramatizes motives, allowing writers and readers to perceive the tensions and alignments that shape social reality. This dramatistic lens reveals how texts do not simply describe motives but participate in their creation and transformation by the symbolic patterns they construct.

Form as Organizing Principle
Form, for Burke, is not merely an arrangement of words or a set of conventions but a system that channels meanings and values. Formal elements, narrative ordering, emphasis, repetition, irony, and metaphor, function to direct attention, establish causal relations, and create identifications among characters, readers, and cultural positions. By examining how form orchestrates these processes, one can see how literature operates as persuasive action that both reflects and shapes communal orientations.

Identification, Division, and the Social Bond
A central claim is that rhetorical identification underlies social cohesion and conflict: people align with others by adopting common terms, attitudes, or symbolic frameworks, while division arises when vocabularies and motives diverge. Literary form is powerful because it creates opportunities for identification and for dramatizing the fractures that threaten shared meanings. Through characterization, perspective, and narrative voice, texts cultivate sympathies, isolate scapegoats, and dramatize the tensions that structure social life.

Analytic Method and Practical Devices
Burke offers an analytic method that reads texts for the motives embedded in their formal choices, treating literary features as clues to underlying orientations and rhetorical intentions. Attention falls on the interplay of emphasis and omission, the dramatization of causes and consequences, and the ways language establishes roles and responsibilities. This method equips critics to trace how particular devices, such as metaphorical complexes or syntactic dramatizations, contribute to broader ideological and ethical effects.

Legacy and Influence
The argument transforms literary criticism by providing a vocabulary for linking aesthetic form to social psychology and rhetoric, laying groundwork for later studies of ideology, narrative theory, and rhetorical analysis. Burke's insistence on symbolic action widened critical attention to the performative and persuasive functions of literature, influencing scholars across rhetoric, communication, and cultural studies. The perspective remains a durable resource for reading texts as active participants in the formation of motives, communities, and power relations.