Burkean Analysis

Abstract:

This essay focuses upon dramatistic nature of crime scene profiling, the technique used to infer the motivations that underlie a baffling but increasingly familiar human act: the “stranger killing.” It argues that this technique of interpreting the symbolic “text” of the crime scene is essentially a rhetorical method that employs with different names the elements and ratios of Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad. My study, like other broad applications of Burkean principles, both validates Burke’s observation of the ubiquity of the two principal dramatistic ratios (act-scene and scene-agent) and affirms the symbolic infusion of all human action, including acts of identification through extreme mortification.

THE MAJOR FEATURE OF ANY STORY of unprovoked violent crime is the baffling question of why such acts occur. Because they are typically random, and because they appear to be without motive as it is commonly understood, these crimes compel our attention even as they terrify and confound us. “Who done...