![]() The photo was printed in Life magazine, accompanied by the following caption: Take Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photo of a couple kissing on Victory over Japan Day in Times Square (1945):Īt the time of the photograph, the identities of the sailor and young woman were not known. The value of Burke’s Pentad is easily demonstrated by analyzing a photograph or painting. If we focus on the scene, by contrast, then we might say that the lighting (or rather the lack of light) drove Tom to grab his chainsaw.īurke’s Pentad thus allows us to notice all the elements of a scene or composition, and it forces us to decide what has caused some action to take place. If we describe the situation from Tom’s perspective, then we would say that he made a decision to cut down the tree. The real question, however, is where we locate motivation in all of this. You can see why Burke talks about a grammar of motives: analyzing a sentence in this way is not that different from parsing a sentence for parts of speech. Scene: Morning (when), in the garden (where) We can organize the information as follows: This morning, Tom got so bothered by the lack of light in his living room that he grabbed a chainsaw and cut down the apple tree in front of the window. The Pentad helps us describe dramatic situations. When represented visually, the five terms are placed at the points of a star (in any order): “ny complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)” (p. The Pentadīurke explained the Pentad in his book A Grammar of Motives (originally published in 1945): In a dramatic and rhetorical situation, motivation is a matter of the relationships (the ratios) between terms. Burke argued that motivation cannot be properly explained as having a single or simple cause. However, the Pentad’s true function has more to do with the relationship between its five terms. At a basic level, the Pentad functions like the journalistic questions (who? where? what? when? why? how?). Kenneth Burke’s Pentad is a popular heuristic that allows us to analyze motivation in any dramatic situation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |