Penulis: Scott Newstok

Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) was the author of many books, including the landmark Motivorum trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955 (2007). He has been hailed as one of the most original American thinkers of the twentieth century and possibly the greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Burke’s enduring familiarity with Shakespeare helped shape his own theory of dramatism, an ambitious elaboration of the “all the world’s a stage” conceit. Burke is renowned for his far-reaching 1951 essay on Othello, which wrestles with concerns still relevant to scholars more than half a century later; his imaginative ventriloquism of Mark Antony’s address over Caesar’s body has likewise found a number of appreciative readers, as have his many other essays on the playwright. Scott L. Newstok is Assistant Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College and Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University.