Burke and Nietzsche

The essay examines the “becoming‐Nietzsche” of Kenneth Burke by exploring the complex linkages between Burke and Nietzsche, particularly those forged by Burke in the 1920s and 30s while formulating his well‐known concepts: perspective by incongruity, motive, terministic screens, and dramatism. An understanding of the ways Nietzsche's philosophy helped shape Burke's views on the nature of language (metaphor, writing, poetry), and the effects language produces, enables a different understanding of central passages in Permanence and Change, Burke the critic, and by extension, the development of rhetoric as a discipline.