Post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s saw a surge in civic participation. The traditional power structure officially relinquished control of political rhetoric and a nascent civil society had begun to emerge. Free elections and political partisanship between reformist and conservative elements of Russian society, spurred on by Russia's economic troubles, gave a "Wild West" tenor to public rhetoric that was reflected in the election campaigns of 1993, 1995, and 1996. In this volume, the authors examine, through a series of contemporaneously written essays, the arc of government rhetoric during the height of media freedom, the quest for a new national identity, and the struggle for self-government.

The essays in this book examine the arguments and rhetoric used by the United States and the USSR following two catastrophes that impacted both countries, as blame is cast and consequences are debated. In this environment, it was perhaps inevitable that conspiracy theories would arise, especially about the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan. Those theories are examined, resulting in at least one method for addressing conspiracy arguments. In the case of Chernobyl, the disaster ruptured the "social compact" between the Soviet government and the people; efforts to overcome the resulting disillusionment quickly became the focus of state efforts.

Following his retirement in 1976 from a distinguished career as a teacher and administrator at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, Cratis Williams wrote these memoirs of his life odyssey from a log cabin in eastern Kentucky to the upper echelons of American education.

Previously unpublished writings by and about Kenneth Burke plus essays by such Burkean luminaries as Wayne C. Booth, William H. Rueckert, Robert Wess, Thomas Carmichael, and Michael Feehan make the publication of Unending Conversations a significant event in the field of Burke studies and in the wider field of literary criticism and theory.

Editors Greig Henderson and David Cratis Williams have divided their material into three parts: "Dialectics of Expression, Communication, and Transcendence", "Criticism, Symbolicity, and Tropology", and "Transcendence and the Theological Motive".

In the first part, Williams's textual introduction and Rueckert's essay analyze the genesis and composition of Burke's "A Symbolic of Motives" and "Poetics, Dramatistically Considered".

Henderson opens part two by showing how in these two essays concerns with literary form hearken back to Burke's first book of criticism, Counter-Statement. Thomas Carmichael discusses Burke's relationship to thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. Wess analyzes the relation between Burke's dramatistic pentad of act, agent, scene, agency, and purpose and his four master tropes -- metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.

In the third part, Booth mines his unpublished correspondence with Burke to demonstrate that Burke is a coy theologian. Michael Feehan discusses Burke's revelation in a 1983 interview that rather than rebounding from a naive kind of Marxism in Permanence and Change, he was rebounding from what he had "learned as a Christian Scientist".