Dramatism

Dramatism is a theoretical position seeking to understand the actions of human life as a drama by Kenneth Burke. Dramatism provides researchers with the flexibility to scrutinize an object of study from variety of angles.

Thus, dramatism is a technique of analysis and language and thought basically modes of action rather than as means of conveying information. The task is to assess the writer and speaker’s motive and describe as what he saw going on when people open their mouths to communicate. Burke’s illustration about the importance of taking language seriously by using the pentad is deceptively similar to the standard journalistic practice of answering who, what, where, when, why, and how in the opening
paragraph of a story.

The act, scene, agent, agency and purpose can be seen as offering a static photograph of a single scene in the human drama. The guilt redemption cycle, the third perspective, would be the plot of the whole play.