8 - The Rhetoric of Religion: history in eclipse

Summary

Finally, History fell a-dreaming

And dreamed about Language –

Burke, CP

In the periodization of Burke's career, there is a late phase. How best to characterize late Burke is a live issue, but there is consensus that there is one. In the 1980s, in texts to be considered in the present chapter, Burke himself helped to form this consensus as he proposed his own characterization of the distinctiveness of his later work. An anticipation of Burke's self-characterization appears in William H. Rueckert's 1982 edition of his pioneering 1963 book, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations – this second edition testifying to the continuing importance of the first. In the chapter added for this new edition – “From Dramatism to Logology” – Rueckert contrasts his initial to his later view of RR:

The book originally seemed like the culmination of dramatism; and in some ways it is. Now, many years later, I see that it also indicated a shift from dramatism to logology… [U]sing one of Burke's own devices, one can say that before 1961 there was Dramatism and logology and after 1961 there was dramatism and Logology… [I]t now seems quite clear that logology moves beyond dramatism and that The Rhetoric of Religion represents a further and almost final state in Burke's long and remarkable development.

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What wasn't initially evident, in short, was that RR's logology was destined to upstage GM's dramatism.