Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory.

[3] Kenneth Duva Burke was born on May 5, 1897 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Peabody High School, where he befriended classmates Malcolm Cowley and James Light.

[7] In Greenwich Village, he kept company with avant-garde writers such as Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, Gorham Munson, and later Allen Tate.

In 1919, he married Lily Mary Batterham, with whom he had three daughters: the late feminist, Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987); musician (Jeanne) Elspeth Chapin Hart (1920-2015); and writer and poet France Burke (born c. 1925).

Many of Burke's personal papers and correspondence are housed at Pennsylvania State University's Special Collections Library.

[11] Burke, like many twentieth-century theorists and critics, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

He resisted being pigeonholed as a follower of any philosophical or political school of thought, and had a notable and very public break with the Marxists who dominated the literary criticism set in the 1930s.

Burke corresponded with a number of literary critics, thinkers, and writers over the years, including William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore.

[12] Later thinkers who have acknowledged Burke's influence include Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, J. Hillis Miller, Susan Sontag (his student at the University of Chicago), Erving Goffman,[13] Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, René Girard, Fredric Jameson, Michael Calvin McGee, Dell Hymes and Clifford Geertz.

Burke's political engagement is evident—A Grammar of Motives takes as its epigraph, ad bellum purificandum (toward the purification of war).

American literary critic Harold Bloom singled out Burke's Counterstatement and A Rhetoric of Motives for inclusion in his book The Western Canon.

In Burke's use of the word identification he is describing the process by which the speaker associates herself/himself with certain groups, such as a target audience.

His idea of "identification" is similar to ethos of classical rhetoric, but it also explains the use of logos and pathos in an effort to create a lasting impression on the auditors.

[14] This theory differs from ethos most significantly in Burke's conception of artistic communication that he believes is defined by eloquence, which is "simply the end of art and therefore its essence."

The use of rhetoric conveys aesthetic and social competence which is why a text can rarely be reduced to purely scientific or political implications, according to Burke.

Rhetoric forms our social identity by a series of events usually based on linguistics, but more generally by the use of any symbolic figures.

Burke proposed that when we attribute motives to others, we tend to rely on ratios between five elements: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose.

The establishment of Guilt necessarily leads to the need to undergo purification to cleanse the individual affected by its recognition.

Burke stated, "In an emphatic way, mortification is the exercising of oneself in 'virtue'; it is a systematic way of saying no to Disorder, or obediently saying yes to Order".

[24] Victimage allows for the creation of a scapegoat that serves as a depository of impurities in order to protect against entities that are alien to a particular society.

Tragic redemption revolves around the idea that guilt combines with the principles of perfection and substitution in order that victimage can be utilized.

Another key concept for Burke is the Terministic screen—a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us.

[26] Burke describes terministic screens as reflections of reality—we see these symbols as things that direct our attention to the topic at hand.

Burke drew not only from the works of Shakespeare and Sophocles, but from films and radio that were important to pop culture, because they were teeming with "symbolic and rhetorical ingredients."

Media today has altered terministic screens, or as Richard Toye wrote in his book Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction, the "linguistic filters which cause us to see situations in particular fashions.

It stands to reason then that people who consider themselves to be Christian, and who internalize that religion's symbol system, inhabit a reality that is different from the one of practicing Buddhists, or Jews, or Muslims.

The same would hold true for people who believe in the tenets of free market capitalism or socialism, Freudian psychoanalysis or Jungian depth psychology, as well as mysticism or materialism.

Each belief system has its own vocabulary to describe how the world works and what things mean, thus presenting its adherents with a specific reality.

His other principal works are He also wrote the song "One Light in a Dark Valley," later recorded by his grandson Harry Chapin.