The New Rhetoric project featured an eleven-year collaboration between Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Chaim Perelman, which culminated with their 1958 magnum opus, "Traite de l'argumentation: la nouvelle rhetorique". Scholars have long speculated about Olbrechts-Tyteca's role in the New Rhetoric project and her relationship with Chaim Perelman.…

Plato's "Symposium" is a significant but neglected part of his elaborate and complex attitude toward rhetoric. Unlike the intellectual discussion of the "Gorgias" or the unscripted conversation of the "Phaedrus," the "Symposium" stages a feast celebrating and driven by the forces of "Eros." A luxuriously stylish performance rather than a rational…

Shows how the rhetoric of selected woman humorists from 1820 to 1880 exemplifies the operation of various comic literary reference frames. Asserts that their comic frame disintegrated because these writers were unable to foster identification between females and males and failed to provide a world view that could accommodate social change. (MM)

Uses Kenneth Burke's "comic frame" to interpret and assess Gandhi's leadership of the Indian civil rights movement and to maintain the relevance and usefulness of the civil disobedience to other movements. (JD)

Analyzes the rhetorical strategies of the direct action AIDS organization ACT UP using Kenneth Burke's concept of the comic frame. Suggests conditions under which other despised and oppressed groups may respond after having been scapegoated by society. (PA)

Rhetorical scholarship criticizes melodrama for its tendency to simplify and reify public controversies and valorizes the comic frame as an ethically superior mode of rhetoric. These judgments are rooted in the discipline's reliance on Burkean categories, a reductionist conception of melodrama, and an implicit assumption that social unification…

Develops a theory of apocalyptic texts and movements by applying Kenneth Burke's conception of the tragic and comic frames of acceptance to the text of the Christian Apocalypse and to the history of its interpretation. Uses Burke's "psychology of form" to explain the recurring patterns of apocalyptic argument as functions of…