Kenneth Burke's influence ranged across history, philosophy and the social sciences. This important study examines Burke's influence on contemporary theories of rhetoric and the subject, and explains why Burke failed to complete his Motives trilogy. Burke's own critique of the "isolated unique individual" led him to question the possibility of unique individuation, thereby anticipating important elements of postmodern concepts of subjectivity. This book is both a timely and judicious exposition of Burke's long career and a crucial intervention in critical debates surrounding rhetoric, history and human agency.

Kenneth Burke, arguably the most important American literary theorist of the twentieth century, helped define the theoretical terrain for contemporary literary and cultural studies. His perspectives were literary and linguistic, but his influences ranged across history, philosophy, and the social sciences. In this important study, first published in 1996, Robert Wess traces the trajectory of Burke's long career and situates his work in relation to postmodernity. His study is both an examination of contemporary theories of rhetoric, ideology, and the subject, and an explanation of why Burke failed to complete his Motives trilogy. Burke's own critique of the 'isolated unique individual' led him to question the possibility of unique individuation, a strategy which anticipated important elements of postmodern concepts of subjectivity. Robert Wess' study is a judicious exposition of Burke's massive oeuvre, and a crucial intervention in debates on rhetoric and human agency.

KENNETH BURKE AND HIS CIRCLES consists of original papers focusing on the intellectual circles in which Burke participated during his long career. Instead of concentrating on Burke himself, as most recent scholarship has done, this book considers Burke as one participant in a host of important overlapping intellectual movements that took place over the course of the twentieth century. Burke is considered as "in conversation" with a host of important principals who influenced Burke and were in turn influenced by him. The essays were selected from among ones first presented at a 2005 conference at Penn State University, the principal repository of Burke archives, and thus the ideal site for this conference's exploration of the circles Burke participated in. Collectively, the papers presented at the conference conceive circles broadly to encompass Burke's relationships to personal friends (e.g., Ralph Ellison), to major intellectual figures (e.g., Richard McKeon, Wayne Booth, Denis Donoghue), to academic fields of study (e.g., neo-Aristotelianism, corporate communication, Continental philosophy), and to cultural and artistic movements (such as jazz and contemporary poetry). Together, the essays offer new and illuminating perspectives on the complexity and diversity of the circles in which Burke worked to produce one of the important and enduring bodies of work in American intellectual life in the twentieth century. JACK SELZER is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Graduate and Undergraduate Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. President of the Rhetoric Society of America from 2008 to 2009, he is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, Kenneth Burke in the 1930s, Rhetorical Bodies, Understanding Scientific Prose, and Good Reasons. In 2005, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kenneth Burke Society. ROBERT WESS is a member of the Emeritus Faculty at Oregon State University and the author of Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism, as well as numerous articles on Burke and other theorists and literary works. He was also the editor of KB Journal's special issue on Ecocriticism (Spring, 2006). In 1999, he received the Distinguished Service Award (1999) from the Kenneth Burke Society and served as its President from 2005 to 2008.