Kenneth Burke's Rhetoric of Identification: Lessons in Reading, Writing, and Living

"Tilly Warnock's KENNETH BURKE'S RHETORIC OF IDENTIFICATION: LESSONS IN READING, WRITING, AND LIVING is an exceptionally well-researched and thorough book that offers, especially for new scholars, the terms for understanding and tracing Burke's theory of identification. Warnock's book invites scholars to consider Burke's identification as the theoretical extension and expansion of enthymematic and syllogistic proof that can be traced back to Counter-Statement and Permanence and Change. Kenneth Burke's Rhetoric of Identification outlines in the first half and illustrates in the second Burke's emphasis on personal, narrative, and argumentative writing as an available means of persuasion. The text is inventive, dense, challenging, and rewarding as Warnock explains and illustrates; much like medical training that invites students to see, do, teach, Warnock invites scholars to See Burke, Do Burke, Teach Burke. Warnock offers both a theoretical framework and practical application of Burke's theory of identification that, by the end of the book, with its discussion of A Rhetoric of Religion and Language as Symbolic Action, has moved through the corpus of Burke's works." -Rochelle Gregory, University of North Texas

Tilly Warnock is Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona, where she taught in the graduate program in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English and directed the first-year writing program. She received her PhD from the University of Southern California in Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Literature. At the University of Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s-the early days of the emergence of the academic field of rhetoric and composition-she published articles on James Joyce and directed the writing center and the Wyoming Conference on English. She hosted Kenneth Burke at the Wyoming Conference in 1985. Her textbook, Writing Is Critical Action (Scott, Forseman & Co.), was published in 1989. She lives with her husband, John Warnock, in Tucson.