DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/56ne-4x64

Babel and Babble in Benjamin and Burke

Authors

Samuel McCormick, San Francisco State UniversityFollow
John Durham Peters, Yale UniversityFollow

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Abstract

Drawing on the works of Walter Benjamin and Kenneth Burke, this essay argues that the philosophical conditions and conclusions of rhetoric and translation are the same: both trace their origins to the primal fall of language, whether after the Fall from Eden or the curse of Babel, and both find their horizons in an ultimate linguistic motive that, oddly enough, typifies ordinary language use.

Recommended Citation

McCormick, Samuel and Peters, John Durham (2021) "Babel and Babble in Benjamin and Burke," communication +1: Vol. 8: Iss. 1, Article 2.
Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol8/iss1/2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/56ne-4x64