Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955. ESSAYS TOWARD A SYMBOLIC OF MOTIVES, 1950¬-1955 contains the work Burke planned to include in the third book in his Motivorum trilogy, which began with A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). In these essays-some of which appear here in print for the first time-Burke offers his most precise and elaborated account of his dramatistic poetics, providing readers with representative analyses of such writers as Aeschylus, Goethe, Hawthorne, Roethke, Shakespeare, and Whitman. Following Rueckert's Introduction, Burke lays out his approach in essays that theorize and illustrate the method, which he considered essential for understanding language as symbolic action and human relations generally. Burke concludes with a focused account of humans as symbol-using and misusing animals and then offers his tour de force reading of Goethe's Faust.
Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke is the largest collection of Burke's book reviews, most of them reprinted here for the first time. In these reviews, as he engages famous works of poetry, fiction, criticism, and social science from the early 20th century, Burke demonstrates the prominent methods and interests of his influential career.