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Randall Jarrell writes in a letter describing a public lecture given by Kenneth Burke in 1952: "It was so bad it was almost feeble-minded; so extravagantly mechanical and verbose and senseless and full of absolutely irrelevant free association that you felt a band of robbers had made up the speech and were making him deliver it, to his own disgrace, with a machine-gun trained on him." Following this vein, this essay considers scholarly resistance to the work, theories, and person of Kenneth Burke. Burke has become a central figure in rhetorical scholarship, so much so that some have come to consider his contributions as a dangerous form of undiagnosed "received wisdom" (Jameson 1978). The extent of the contemporary inducement to resist Burke is great enough to warrant discussion of resistance to Burke as an intellectual movement in rhetorical studies, and as such further warrants a discussion of what effects this movement may be having in our field. Finally, the essay considers whether rhetoric has something to gain by making such a divestment from a Burke-centric view of its own foundations, and investigates the disciplinary stakes such a debate lays bare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]