Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech has become an icon of
American public culture, its imagery and words profoundly influencing
the civil rights debate. In The Rhetoric of Redemption Bobbitt applies
Kenneth Burke's theory of guilt-purification-redemption in a close,
critical analysis of the speech, developing and examining the
implications of Burke's redemption drama in contemporary public
discourse. He studies the impact of the speech over time, arguing that,
while King's speech contains an inspirational vision of national
redemption, it does so by omitting the real difficulties of overcoming
America's racial divisions.