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While rhetoric as a discipline is firmly planted in humanism and anthropology, posthumanism seeks to leave the human behind. This highly original examination of Kenneth Burke's thought grapples with these ostensibly contradictory concepts as opportunities for invention, revision, and, importantly, transdisciplinary knowledge making. Rather than simply mapping posthumanist rhetorics onto Burke's scholarship, Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman focuses on the multiplicity of ideas found both in his work and in the idea of posthumanism. Taking varied approaches organized within a framework of boundaries and futures, the contributors show that studying the humanist theories of Burke in this way creates a satisfyingly chaotic web of interconnections. The essays look at how Burke's writing on the human mind and technology, from his earliest works to his very latest revisions, interrelates with current concepts such as new materiality and coevolution. Throughout, the contributors pay close attention to the fluidity, concerns, and contradictions inherent in language, symbolism, and subjectivity. A unique, illuminating exploration of the contested relationship between bodies and language, this inherently transdisciplinary book will propel important future inquiry by scholars of rhetoric, Burke, and posthumanism. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Casey Boyle, Kristie Fleckenstein, Nathan Gale, Julie Jung, Steven B. Katz, Steven LeMieux, Jodie Nicotra, Jeff Pruchnic, Timothy Richardson, Thomas Rickert, and Robert Wess.

Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burkefocuses on the little-known but important friendship between two canonical American writers. The story of this fifty-year friendship, however, is more than literary biography; Bryan Crable argues that the Burke-Ellison relationship can be interpreted as a microcosm of the American \"racial divide.\" Through examination of published writings and unpublished correspondence, he reconstructs the dialogue between Burke and Ellison about race that shaped some of their most important works, including Burke'sA Rhetoric of Motivesand Ellison'sInvisible Man.In addition, the book connects this dialogue to changes in American discourse about race. Crable shows that these two men were deeply connected, intellectually and personally, but the social division between white and black Americans produced hesitation, embarrassment, mystery, and estrangement where Ellison and Burke might otherwise have found unity. By using Ellison's nonfiction and Burke's rhetorical theory to articulate a new vocabulary of race, the author concludes not with a simplistic \"healing\" of the divide but with a challenge to embrace the responsibility inherent to our social order. American Literatures Initiative

The Rites of Identityargues that Kenneth Burke was the most deciding influence on Ralph Ellison's writings, that Burke and Ellison are firmly situated within the American tradition of religious naturalism, and that this tradition--properly understood as religious--offers a highly useful means for considering contemporary identity and mitigating religious conflict. Beth Eddy adds Burke and Ellison to a tradition of religious naturalism that traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson but received its most nuanced expression in the work of George Santayana. Through close readings of the essays and fiction of Burke and Ellison, Eddy shows the extent to which their cultural criticisms are intertwined. Both offer a naturalized understanding of piety, explore the psychological and social dynamics of scapegoating, and propose comic religious resources. And both explicitly connect these religious categories to identity, be it religious, racial, national, ethnic, or gendered. Eddy--arguing that the most socially damaging uses of religious language and ritual are connected to the best uses that such language has to offer--finds in Burke and Ellison ways to manage this precarious situation and to mitigate religious violence through wise use of performative symbolic action. By placing Burke and Ellison in a tradition of pragmatic thought,The Rites of Identityuncovers an antiessentialist approach to identity that serves the moral needs of a world that is constantly negotiating, performing, and ritualizing changes of identity.

The charismatic movement that began in the first century currently spans the globe. The term \"charismatic\" refers to the \"gifts of the Holy Spirit\"—speaking in tongues, healing, prophecy, and discernment—said to be available to Christians who have surrendered their lives to Christ. Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture takes readers on a journey to discover the history of the movement and the reasons why more and more Christians are finding the charismatic experience so meaningful. Leading scholars in the fields of religion and anthropology discuss the thought patterns and religious traditions of charismatics throughout the world. By examining believers throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, the contributors provide a comprehensive overview of a charismatic tapestry that appears to transcend national, ethnic, racial, and class boundaries. In her introduction, Karla Poewe describes how believers attempt to integrate mind, body, and spirit, thereby providing for a more holistic religious experience. Poewe points out that charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism have suffered from academic biases in the past; this book is one of the first to place the charismatic experience in an academic framework.

Kenneth Burke--rhetorician, philosopher, linguist, sociologist, literary and music critic, crank--was one of the foremost theorists of literary form. He did not fit tidily into any philosophical school, nor was he reducible to any simple set of principles or ideas. He published widely, and is probably best known for two of his classic works, A Rhetoric of Motive and Philosophy of Literary Form. His observations on myth, however, were never systematic, and much of his writing on literary theory and other topics cannot be fully understood without fleshing out his thoughts on myth and mythmaking. Laurence Coupe is Senior Lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Myth (1997) and editor of The Green Studies Reader (2000).

Romancing the Difference examines the rhetoric of fundamentalism as seen through the lens of Bob Jones University. Highlighting the romantic language used by religious separatists, Lewis argues that fundamentalism is not the angry cry of an outsider, nor is it the mocking of secular culture. Instead, it is an attempt to embody and articulate things that are lovely in order to woo others to an entirely different kind of life.

Sometimes in life, people have a straightforward pathway, one mapped with clear boundaries. Other times, they wander until they find the course they feel they were meant to take, often through using various maps that overlap yet contradict, with blurred lines and blended terrain. That is how Clements came to General Semantics. He began studying rhetoric in graduate school and took a deep dive into the writings of Kenneth Burke. His books were impressive, though meandering at best. He felt that he could find anything he was looking for in them if he only dug and theorized enough. But then he realized that even the best writing could be bullshit. With this realization in his pocket, he read Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit. Fascinated by how words could be frivolous, he searched for more information on the topic. That's how he stumbled upon Neil Postman's \"Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection\" from 1969.

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology is a lucid and accessible introduction to a major twentieth-century thinker those ideas have influenced fields as diverse as literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, politics and anthropology. Stephen Bygrave explores the content of Burke's vast output of work, focusing especially on his preoccupation with the relation between language, ideology and action. By considering Burke as a reader and writer of narratives and systems, Bygrave examines the inadequacies of earlier readings of Burke and unfolds his thought within current debates in Anglo-American cultural theory. This is an excellent re-evaluation of Burke's thought and valuble introduction to the impressive range of his ideas.