A History of Personal Identification-- Growth of the Orator in Invisible Man

The notion of invisibility in Invisible Man is spoken out by the protagonist＇s growth as an orator. Rather than a recursive retrieving of his identity throughout the narrative, the invisible man reinvents his identity in his pursuit of pure persuasion. Both being terms in the Burkean system of literature rhetoric, pure persuasion, and identification become one for the unconscious purpose and the other for the symbolic action respectively in the protagonist-speaker＇s growth from an ideal emulator to speaker-audience mediator. In his identification with the audience and his ardent pursuit of pure persuasion, he paradoxically finds himself distanced from both his identity-to-be and the identity of his audience, with great division in-between. Though temporary corporation is achieved and occasional identification is resolved in the last two speeches, the protagonist only finds himself in a rhetorical context which is much more varied and more manipulative than he imagined. Such a realization renders the invisible man invisible again from the public stadium, who decides to resort to the pen for a life-long identification with the broader battlefield of racial discontinuity

The Dramatistic Action of Language in Thomas Kyd＇s The Spanish Tragedy

Kenneth Burke＇s rhetoric on language as a symbolic action offers an enlightening perspective for revealing the connection between the motivations and actions of the characters in Thomas Kyd＇s The Spanish Tragedy. This work is a Renaissance drama that features hues of rhetorical language. Linguistic obfuscation, scapegoat mechanism, and the malfunction and dysfunction of language in victimization and revenge are thrown into relief through Burke＇s elaborate system of the symbolism of language. Analyzing the discursive performances of the main characters, readers could get clues of their motives that drive their actions, which are both a representation and an illustration of how language as a symbolic action works in literature

Stasis Salience and the Enthymemic Thesis

The argumentative stasis theory and enthymeme principles richly complement each other but they have rarely been investigated jointly. We correct this oversight first with a principled re-analysis of the stasis tradition, resulting in a double-layer stasis system: Cicero's later system(in De Oratore and Topica) with "action" stasis' subclassification, modified by Kenneth Burke's dramatic pentad of act, scene, agent, agency, purpose(in A Grammar of Motives). Then inspired by Ronald Langacker's salience theory in cognitive linguistics, we secure two stasis deployment strategies: selection(profile against base) and prominence(trajector against landmark). Stasis theory thus solidified, we examine how it interacts with the two central aspects of the enthymemic thesis: incompleteness and probability and how the enthymemic thesis helps explain the force of stasis theory. This inquiry contributes to rhetorical theory and criticism; argumentation studies; and linguistics, by showing the reach of salience theory.