This study of Kenneth Burke's writings traces the critic's commitment and contribution to philosophy prior to 1945. The author contends that rather than belonging to the late-modernist tradition, Burke actually starts from a position closely akin to such postmodern figures as Michel Foucault.

The rhetorical tradition, Michelle Ballif asserts, is based on the systematic exclusion of sophistry. In keeping with Aristotle s prescription, rhetoric continues to be a counterpart to dialectic, a handmaiden to the pursuit of trutheven if that truth is merely probable.

According to Ballif, this search for truth manifests itself among current rhetoric and composition scholars in the form of an assumption that language is primarily communicative (i.e., that language can represent truth more or less faithfully). Ballif shows how invested we are in the notion of truth, in the idea that...