Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism
Camille Kaminski Lewis
Baylor University Press, 2007
176 pages
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In the spirit Kenneth Burke’s comic critique, this book crafts a vocabulary for understanding separatist rhetoric by extending Kenneth’s Burke’s notions of tragedy and comedy. I argue that religious sectarian discourse falls outside the tragic or comic frames of acceptance but operates within a third frame-—romance. Although neither tragically goaded by nor comically laughing at the dream, the religious separatist seeks to embody “whatsoever things are lovely” in order to woo their lonely Other.
