The Rhetoric of Religion

"This is by a forefigure who became a close personal friend and my ultimate mentor, the great American literary theorist Kenneth Burke. His finest and last book, it is a study of Saint Augustine, but even more importantly a study of how the metaphors of the books of Genesis, and the Hebrew bible, individuate themselves. Kenneth Burke was the most remarkable student of rhetoric – that is to say of persuasive argument conducted through tropes and metaphors – of the 20th century. I miss him a great deal. He’s been dead for a number of years, though he lived until 96. I hope Mike Abrams goes considerably past that."