Armin Paul Frank posits that Kenneth Burke's dramatistic worldview originates from his perspective on literary works, treating them as ritual drama. This notion was articulated and employed in his 1941 work, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. In A Grammar of Motives, Burke extended this literary dramatistic method to explore human motivation more broadly. Subsequently, he continued to develop this extraliterary program in seminal works such as A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1961), and Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (1966). Conversely, Lentricchia interpreted A Grammar of Motives through the lens of Burke’s earlier major works, including Counter-Statement (1931), Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1935), and Attitudes Toward History (1937).

Lentricchia contends that Burke's approach, termed "comedic formalism," emerged as a response to a time of severe economic and political turmoil. This formalism, shared with contemporaries like Brooks and de Man, is contextualized socially, promising, through its comedic historical understanding, a secular and literary utopia. In such a space, the transcendence achieved isn't an end to history, but rather a deep understanding of its nature—past, present, and future—viewed from an advantageous position above its conflicts.

Meanwhile, Fredric Jameson observes that despite the detached and ironic stance Burke's dramatistic analysis seems to create between observers and history, during the historical backdrop of the 1930s and World War II, Burke's emphasis on language served a different purpose. Rather than supporting the modern ideologies of intrinsic meaning and anti-referential texts, it sought to restore the literary text’s role as an active entity. Here, the text becomes a meaningful gesture and a direct response to specific situations, offering a dynamic interaction with its historical context.