On the new books shelves of my friendly local public library I found the 2024 book by Robin Reames titled The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The power of rhetoric in polarized times. I have been skimming through it. Titles for five of her six chapters include classical names: Gorgias, Protagoras, Alcibiades, Callias, and Aspasia. They are followed by a Conclusion chapter and a detailed educational one on How to Think Rhetorically.
Chapter 3 is titled How Rhetoric Shapes Reality: Protagoras on What Language Can Do. A section starting on page 83 is titled Tell Me a Story, and it begins with the following paragraph:
“In the aftermath of the Second World War, a rhetorical critic named Kenneth Burke made the case for analyzing the stories people tell in order to understand how they package reality. He believed that a careful analysis of Hitler’s rhetoric – indeed, any rhetoric – might have prevented his disastrous rise to power. Burke’s five-part method for analyzing stories (which he called ‘the pentad’) was his attempt to examine ‘the basic stratagems which people employ, in endless variations, and consciously or unconsciously, for the outwitting or cajoling of one another.’ If we could recognize those stories as stories, Burke thought, we’d be less easily outwitted and cajoled.”
There is a good brief discussion by John R. Edlund in an article at Teaching Text Rhetorically on September 29, 2018 titled Using Kenneth Burke’s Pentad. The Wikipedia article is titled Dramatistic pentad. And there is yet another article by Gregory Kuper at LinkedIn Pulse on January 22, 2021 titled Dramatism: A Communication Theory That Can Be Utilized By Organizations To Better Understand Persuasion.
In her educational chapter on How to Think Rhetorically Robin has a section starting on on page 241 titled Let’s Think Rhetorically: The Pentad. Her discussion of those terms is:
Act
The act is dramatic action that the discourse describes as taking place. What terms refer to the action? What does the speaker or rhetor claim is happening in the world? What actions, behaviors, events, or occurrences does the discourse describe?....
Scene
The scene is the context that contains the act. Typically, people describe scenes in ways that set a tone for the action they contain. For example, ‘a dark and stormy night’ sets a tone of ominous foreboding; ‘a bright and sunny morning’ sets an optimistic and cheery tone. ….
Agent (aka the main characters)
The agent is the term that refers to the person or persons performing the main action. The agent is the central figure who is playing some role in a scene. While a piece of discourse may describe many different people or groups, typically the main section will center around one person or group of people who is the main actor. ….
Agency (aka the props)
The agency refers to the tool, instrument, or means that the agent uses to perform the action. In the same way that a carpenter uses tools to build furniture or a chef uses pots and pans to prepare a meal, the agency is the term or terms that refer to the tools or instruments that the main agent uses in the scene. ….
Purpose
Why is the agent doing what he is doing? What is the reason or goal for the act? The answers to these questions indicate the purpose. The purpose encompasses the values, aims, objectives, and intentions that guide the agent and compel her to perform the act.
There is a good brief Harry Potter based example of using the Pentad in a four-minute YouTube video by Bethany Alley titled Kenneth Burke’s Dramatic Pentad. The act is making a potion. The scene is the potions classroom at Hogwarts. The agent is Hermione Granger, a Hogwarts student. The agency is those supplies and ingredients used to make the potion. The purpose just was to complete a class assignment.
There is a long, detailed example of the Pentad in an article by R. Chase Dunn in Kaleidoscope, on pages 73 to 89 in 2018, titled “The Future is in Good Hands”: A Pentadic Analysis of President Barack Obama’s Farewell Address.
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