A Grammar of Motives

""A Grammar of Motives," published in 1945, is the first volume of a gigantic trilogy, planned to include "A Rhetoric of Motives" and "A Symbolic of Motives, " which will be called something like "On Human Relations." The aim of the whole series is n... Read more

""A Grammar of Motives," published in 1945, is the first volume of a gigantic trilogy, planned to include "A Rhetoric of Motives" and "A Symbolic of Motives, " which will be called something like "On Human Relations." The aim of the whole series is no less than the comprehensive exploration of human motives and the forms of thought and expression built around them, and its ultimate object, expression in the epigraph: "'ad bellum purificandum, '" is to eliminate the whole world of conflict that can be eliminated through understanding. The method or key metaphor for the study is 'drama' or 'dramatism, ' and the basic terms of analysis are the dramatistic pentad: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose. The "Grammar, " which Burke confesses in the Introduction grew from a prolegomena of a few hundred words to nearly 200,000, is a consideration of the purely internal relationship of these five terms, 'their possibilities of transformation, their range of permutations and combinations'..."--Stanley Edgar Hyman, author of "The Armed Vision" Less