In the narrative in these pages of Kenneth Burke's career, the themes of rhetoric, subjectivity, and postmodernism are concentrated in the term “a rhetoric, of the subject.” Our term rather than Burke's, “a rhetoric of the subject” designates, as it were, the position of the narrator in this narrative.

Offering glimpses of the overall structure of the narrative in passing, chapter 1 introduces a rhetoric of the human subject, placing it in the context of contemporary theory, particularly contemporary theorizing of ideology, here construed as a rhetoricizing of ideology. Chapter 1's argument, in a nutshell, is that contemporary theory needs Burke's rhetorical realism of the act to preserve the theoretical gains of recent decades by warding off the rhetorical idealism that sometimes threatens to undermine them.

A rhetoric of the subject is apart from and a part of Burke's career: a part of it in the sense that we extrapolate this rhetoric from GM and RM, considered here as constituting a completed rhetorical theory of the subject; apart from it in the sense that Burke seems always to have seen these two books as two parts of a trilogy needing SM to be complete. Further, during the final phase of his career, he tends to shy away from the full implications of a rhetoric of the subject, although near the end of his life, there may be one last change in direction.