Pure Persuasion: Metarhetorical Motives in Kenneth Burke's Towards a Better Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is Kenneth Burke's 1932 novel, Towards a Better Life , an example of protopostmodernism? A number of critics in recent years have resurrected from the corpus of Burke's theoretical work embryonic - in some cases, advanced - models of postmodern theory. What hasn't been analyzed in commensurate detail for its uncanny prescience is Burke's early novel, a work, I would argue, ahead of its time in many respects. While already applauded for its verbal energy and lyrical grace, 'the internal eventfulness of its sentences,' as Denis Donoghue puts it, the novel's theoretical implications remain to be fully adumbrated in respect to a profound concern with the manner in which language games, or 'terministic screens,' to use Burke's neologism, can foreclose prospects for communicative engagement. At the heart of Burke's novel is a complex and ultimately unresolvable tension between the pleasures of 'pure persuasion' (metarhetorical motives) and the imperatives of salutary communicative involvement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".