Dramatistic pentad

Aspect of dramatism

The dramatistic pentad forms the core structure of dramatism, a method for examining motivations that the renowned literary critic Kenneth Burke developed. Dramatism recommends the use of a metalinguistic approach to stories about human action that investigates the roles and uses of five rhetorical elements common to all narratives, each of which is related to a question. These five rhetorical elements form the "dramatistic pentad". Burke argues that an evaluation of the relative emphasis that is given to each of the five elements by a human drama enables a determination of the motive for the behaviour of its characters. A character's stress on one element over the others suggests their world view. Burke introduced the pentad in his 1945 book A Grammar of Motives. Burke based his pentad on the scholastic hexameter which defines "questions to be answered in the treatment of a topic: Who, what, where, by what means, why, how, when". Burke created the pentad by combining several of the categories in the scholastic hexameter. The result was a pentad that has the five categories of: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. Burke states, "The 'who' is obviously covered by agent. Scene covers the 'where' and the 'when'. The 'why' is purpose. 'How' and 'by what means' fall under agency. All that is left to take care of is act in our terms and 'what' in the scholastic formula".

The dramatistic pentad comprises the five rhetorical elements: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. The "world views" listed below reflect the prominent schools of thought during Burke's time, "without dismissing any of them," to read them "at once sympathetically and critically in relation to each other," and "in a wider context than any of them recognizes."

Act, which is associated with dramatic action verbs and answers the question "what? ", is related to the world view of realism; What happened? What is the action? What is going on? What action; what thoughts? Burke defines the act as that which "names what took place, in thought or deed." Since an act is likely composed of many separate actions, Burke states that "any verb, no matter how specific or general, that has connotations of consciousness or purpose falls under this category."

Scene, which is associated with the setting of an act and answers the questions "when?" and "where? ", is related to the world view of materialism and minimal or non existent free will. Burke defines the scene as "the background of an act, the situation in which it occurred."

A relationship between the agent (person) and the scene (place or setting). A scene can pose restrictions on the agent; in a narrative, the person and place should have some connection. Attitude is defined as "the preparation for an act, which would make it a kind of symbolic act, or incipient act." The attitude, like the agency, would answer the "how?". There is still some uncertainty over whether attitude is an additional element, and thus makes the dramatistic pentad a hexad, or if it is still a sub element of the original pentad. Scholars have read this as Burke's desire not to "dispose of" ambiguity, but rather to "study and clarify the resources of ambiguity." As a result, many diagrams of the pentad depict attitude as a derivative of agent.