Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose

by Kenneth Burke

Permanence and Change was written and first published in the depths of the Great Depression. Attitudes Toward History followed it two years later. These were revolutionary texts in the theory of communication, and, as classics, they retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, whereas Attitudes Towards History characterizes tactics and patterns of conflict typical of actual human associations. It is in Permanence and Change that Burke establishes in path-breaking fashion that form permeates society just as it does poetry and the arts. Hence, his master idea that forms of art are not exclusively aesthetic: the cycles of a storm, the gradations of a sunrise, the stages of an epidemic, the undoing of Prince Hamlet are all instances of progressive form. This new edition of Permanence and Change reprints Hugh Dalziel Duncan's long sociological introduction and includes a substantial new afterward in which Burke reexamines his early ideas in light of subsequent developments in his own thinking and in social theory.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Communication, Criticism, Theory, Cultural Studies, Academic

398 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1965

About the author

Kenneth Duva Burke was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.

Reviews

[Quiver · Rating 3 out of 5]

For in this world, communication is never an absolute (only angels communicate absolutely);
...
In its simplest manifestation, style is ingratiation.
...
Santayana has somewhere defined piety as loyalty to the sources of our being.

Burke is known for his aphoristic, highly-quotable style, but the context itself is needed to understand his point. That said, as highly enthusiastic as I was with his sheer display of erudition, other texts manages to eclipse my memory of this book. The long-winded discursive style didn't help. Still, I intend to return to Burke some other time.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for a course in American literature of the Great Depression. Mostly a treatise on communication and the relationships between language and action and language and morality, this text is useful in theorizing the way that crisis (such as economic upheaval) causes communication breakdowns that create major shifts in the culturally agreed-upon meanings of words.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd read parts of this book before, but had never actually gone through it from cover to cover. Burke's major contribution here is a vocabulary for understanding the orientations/starting points that we have, the way that these are troubled, and how we then transition from moments and times of instability into new areas of stability as societies and as individuals. What I was surprised by as I went through the actual book was how much psychology was involved, or how engaged Burke was with discussing psychological ideas and their relations to philosophies. As such it seemed to me that some of the linkages that he was drawing were a bit more obscure based on my lack of reading in some of those theories; this isn't to say that the book isn't great, or that those parts held little value to me, but merely that they were a bit more obscure and difficult than the earlier parts of the book, which are more directly linked to charting a systematic perspective on how orientations and predispositions are changed and affected by change. Definitely not a simple read, but a good one.

[Aziza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Always relevant. Some parts are outdated but if you know they are, you’re good to go on reading

[Dieter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too much clever buried in this on the anatomy of language and its role in social change and orientation, disorientation, reorientation. No great pleasure to read but a great pleasure to think with. My first fully completed from this master

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Burke is my guy, and this is fascinating as a looser, more free-wheeling articulation of what he'd get back to in Rhetoric of Motive.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything the man writes is genius.