Henderson (English, U. of Toronto) and Williams (speech communication, U. of Missouri, Rolla) present this collection, which includes previously unpublished portions of two of Burke's manuscripts, Poetics, Dramatistically Considered and A Symbolic of Motives, as well as essays by seven U.S. and Canadian scholars. The ten pieces are organized into three sections on dialectics of expression, communication, and transcendence; criticism, symbolicity, and tropology; and transcendence and the theological motive. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Previously unpublished writings by and about Kenneth Burke plus essays by such Burkean luminaries as Wayne C. Booth, William H. Rueckert, Robert Wess, Thomas Carmichael, and Michael Feehan make the publication of "Unending Conversations "a significant event in the field of Burke studies and in the wider field of literary criticism and theory. Editors Greig Henderson and David Cratis Williams have divided their material into three parts: Dialectics of Expression, Communication, and Transcendence, Criticism, Symbolicity, and Tropology, and Transcendence and the Theological Motive. In the first part, Williams s textual introduction and Rueckert s essay analyze the genesis and composition of Burke s "A Symbolic of Motives" and "Poetics, Dramatistically Considered." Henderson opens part two by showing how these two essays concerns with literary form hearken back to Burke s first book of criticism, "Counter-Statement. " Thomas Carmichael discusses Burke s relationship to thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. Wess analyzes the relation between Burke s dramatistic pentad of act, agent, scene, agency, and purpose and his four master tropesmetaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. In the third part, Booth mines his unpublished correspondence with Burke to demonstrate that Burke is a coy theologian. Michael Feehan discusses Burke s revelation in a 1983 interview that rather than rebounding from a naive kind of Marxism in "Permanence and Change," he was rebounding from what he had learned as a Christian Scientist. "

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.

Introduction : discursive conditions -- Language, philosophy, and sophistry -- Contributions to a conversation about the conversation of humanity : Heidegger and Gadamer, Oakeshott and Rorty -- Lectures and letters as conversation : Cavell as educator in cities of words -- Conclusion : redeeming words.

This volume brings together leading scholars in the area of symbolic interactionism to offer a broad discussion of issues including identity, dialogue and legitimacy.

In God we trust, the rest we monitor . . . A former chief of India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, deconstructs the shadowy world of spies, from the Cold War era to the age of global jihad, from surveillance states to psy-war and cyberwarfare, from gathering information to turning it into credible intelligence. Vikram Sood provides a panoramic view of the rarely understood profession of spying to serve a country's strategic and security interests. As a country's stature and reach grow, so do its intelligence needs. This is especially true for one like India that has ambitions of being a global player even as it remains embattled in its own neighbourhood. The Unending Game tackles these questions while providing a national and international perspective on gathering external intelligence, its relevance in securing and advancing national interests, and why intelligence is the first playground in the game of nations.