"Seventh Conference of the Wives of Heads of State and Governments of the Americas"
The setting is a meeting at the Seventh Conference of the Wives of Heads of State and Governments of the Americas in Panama City, Panama. This was held on October 10, 1997.
The speaker is Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of President Clinton of the United States. As the representative of the United States at the conference, her words would have been of particular interest to the other countries of the hemisphere. She speaks primarily not to politicians but to their wives, and her message is tailored to what she presumes are their interests in protecting women, children, and families. The speech as given in the morning.
The five basic elements of Burkean pentadic criticism are act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose, serving as guides in discovering motives. Kenneth Burke developed the dramatism approach to unify rhetoric and poetic in a single analytical framework under which statements about motives can be studied and compared in terms of the ways in which they treat the dramatic elements of human relations through the pentad, or five elements of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. This pentad is meant as a way of analyzing descriptions of human behavior and is not the human behavior itself. Burke is concerned with the analysis of language and not reality. Burke's method is dialectical, though by today's standards it might also be termed deconstructive as he reveals contrary meanings in supposedly positive terms and places an emphasis on the way language "defeats" reality (Bizzell and Herzberg 990).
Applied to this speech, the Burkean approach identifies the act as a speech to an assembled group, the scene as the setting discussed above, Hillary Clinton as the agent, and oral presentation as the agency. The remaining issue is the purpose of the speech and how well the various elements are developed to achieve the desired purpo...