A guide to and analysis of a seminal books key concepts and methodology Since its publication in 1935, Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change, a text that can serve as an introduction to all his theories, has become a landmark of rhetorical theory. Using new archival sources and contextualizing Burke in the past and present, Ann George offers the first sustained exploration of this work and seeks to clarify the challenging book for both amateurs and scholars of rhetoric. This companion to Permanence and Change explains Burke's theories through analysis of key concepts and methodology, demonstrating how, for Burke, all language and therefore all culture is persuasive by nature. Positioning Burke's book as a pioneering volume of New Rhetoric, George presents it as an argument against systemic violence, positivism, and moral relativism. Permanence and Change has become the focus of much current rhetorical study, but George introduces Burke's previously unavailable outlines and notes, as well as four drafts of the volume, to investigate his work more deeply than ever before. Through further illumination of the book's development, publication, and reception, George reveals Burke as a public intellectual and critical educator, rather than the eccentric, aloof genius earlier scholars imagined him to be. George argues that Burke was not ahead of his time, but rather deeply engaged with societal issues of the era. She redefines Burke's mission as one of civic engagement, to convey the ethics and rhetorical practices necessary to build communities interested in democracy and human welfare—lessons that George argues are as needed today as they were in the 1930s.

Frank Kermode attempts to determine the criteria for classical literature through an analysis of the social and intellectual importance of great works of the past.

Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change, written by American literary theorist Kenneth Burke, was first published in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression. Burke followed this with Attitudes Toward History followed just two years later. His texts proved to be revolutionary in the theory of communication, and, as classics, retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, and in this book, Burke establishes, in ground-breaking fashion, that form permeates society, just as it does poetry and the arts. This present volume is the Second Edition, first published in 1954, and includes an Introduction by Hugh Dalziel Duncan. “Unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America.”—W. H. Auden “One of the truly speculative American thinkers of his era.”—Malcolm Cowley “The foremost critic of our time and perhaps the greatest critic since Coleridge.”—Stanley Edgar Hyman “What Burke has done better than anyone else is to find a way of connecting literature to life without reducing either. He’s had far less attention than he deserves because he’d been so far ahead of his time. But he’s one of the major minds of the twentieth century, and he’s sure to be read in the future.”—Wayne Booth

Permanence and Change was written and first published in the depths of the Great Depression. Attitudes Toward History followed it two years later. These were revolutionary texts in the theory of communication, and, as classics, they retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, whereas Attitudes Towards History characterizes tactics and patterns of conflict typical of actual human associations. It is in Permanence and Change that Burke establishes in path-breaking fashion that form permeates society just as it does poetry and the arts. Hence, his master idea that forms of art are not exclusively aesthetic: the cycles of a storm, the gradations of a sunrise, the stages of an epidemic, the undoing of Prince Hamlet are all instances of progressive form. This new edition of Permanence and Change reprints Hugh Dalziel Duncan's long sociological introduction and includes a substantial new afterward in which Burke reexamines his early ideas in light of subsequent developments in his own thinking and in social theory.

How should one approach the notion of the precarious in art – its meanings and its outcomes? Its presence in artistic practices may be transient, yet it instigates permanent changes in the production, discourse, and perception of art. The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art gathers essays that examine the traces and implications of precariousness in contemporary art, and lays a foundation for a thoughtful study of its emergence in related fields throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The different perspectives represented in this volume touch on art history and theory, curatorial practice, media art, philosophy, language, and transnational studies, and highlight artists’ narratives. Together, these interdisciplinary essays locate precariousness as an undercurrent in contemporary art and a connective tissue across diverse areas of knowledge and everyday life.

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