Front cover image for The rites of identity : the religious naturalism and cultural criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison

The rites of identity : the religious naturalism and cultural criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison

Beth Eddy
The Rites of Identity argues that Kenneth Burke was the most deciding influence on Ralph Ellison's writings, that Burke and Ellison are firmly situated within the American tradition of religious naturalism, and that this tradition--properly understood as religious--offers a highly useful means for considering contemporary identity and mitigating religious conflict. Beth Eddy adds Burke and Ellison to a tradition of religious naturalism that traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson but received its most nuanced expression in the work of George Santayana. Through close readings of the essays and fictio
eBook, English, ©2003
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., ©2003
History
1 online resource (204 pages)
9781400825769, 9780691092492, 1400825768, 0691092494
436089327
Identity and the rites of symbolic action
Kenneth Burke's natural pieties of identity
Catharsis and tragedy : Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of sacrifice
The spiritual utility of comedy
Ralph Ellison and the vernacular pieties of American identity
Ellison's tragic vision of sacrifice
The blues of American identity : comic transcendence in Ellison
Both a part of and apart from : the spirit and ethics of religious pragmatism