Kenneth Burke

Kenneth Burke. Courtesy the University of New South Wales.

Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was an American poet, and a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.

Life

Youth and education

Burke was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He graduated from Peabody High School, where his friend Malcolm Cowley was also a student. Burke attended Ohio State University for only a semester, then studied at Columbia University in 1916-1917 before dropping out to be a writer.

Career

In Greenwich Village he kept company with avant-garde writers such as Hart Crane, Cowley, Gorham Munson, and later Allen Tate. Raised Roman Catholic, Burke later became an avowed agnostic.

In 1919 he married Lily Mary Batterham, with whom he had three daughters: the late feminist, Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987); musician (Jeanne) Elspeth Chapin Hart (b. 1920); and writer and poet France Burke (b. ~1925). He would later marry her sister Elizabeth Batterham in 1933 and have two sons, Michael and Anthony. Burke served as the editor of the modernist literary magazine The Dial in 1923, and as its music critic from 1927-1929. Kenneth himself was an avid player of the saxophone and flute. He received the Dial Award in 1928 for distinguished service to American literature. He was the music critic of The Nation from 1934–1936, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935.

In later life his New Jersey farm was a popular summer retreat for his extended family, as reported by his grandson Harry Chapin, a contemporary popular song artist. He died of heart failure at his home in Andover, New Jersey.

Writing

Influences

Burke, like many 20th century theorists and critics, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a lifelong interpreter of Shakespeare, and was also significantly influenced by Thorstein Veblen.

Burke corresponded with a number of literary critics, thinkers, and writers over the years, including William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ralph Ellison, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore.

Later thinkers who have acknowledged Burke's influence include Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, Susan Sontag (his student at the University of Chicago), Erving Goffman, Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, Rene Girard, Fredric Jameson, Michael Calvin McGee, and Clifford Geertz.

Burke resisted being pigeonholed as a follower of any philosophical or political school of thought, and had a notable and very public break with the Marxists who dominated the literary criticism set in the 1930s. The political and social power of symbols was central to Burke's scholarship throughout his career. His political engagement is evident, for example, at the outset of A Grammar of Motives in its epigraph, ad bellum purificandum -- toward the purification of war, with "pure" war implying its elimination. Burke felt that the study of rhetoric would help human beings understand "what is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it." Burke called such analysis "dramatism" and believed that such an approach to language analysis and use could help us understand the basis of conflict, the virtues and dangers of cooperation, and the opportunities of identification and consubstantiality.

Philosophy

Burke defined the rhetorical function of language as "a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." His definition of humanity states that "man" is "the symbol using, making, and mis-using animal, inventor of the negative, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, and rotten with perfection." For Burke, some of the most significant problems in human behavior resulted from instances of symbols using human beings rather than human beings using symbols.

Burke proposed that when we attribute motives to others, we tend to rely on ratios between five elements: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. This has become known as the dramatistic pentad. The pentad is grounded in his dramatistic method, which considers human communication as a form of action. Dramatism "invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action" (Grammar of Motives xxii). Burke pursued literary criticism not as a formalistic enterprise but rather as an enterprise with significant sociological impact; he saw literature as "equipment for living," offering folk wisdom and common sense to people and thus guiding the way they lived their lives.

Another key concept for Burke is the terministic screen -- a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us. Here Burke offers rhetorical theorists and critics a way of understanding the relationship between language and ideology. Language, Burke thought, doesn't simply "reflect" reality; it also helps select reality as well as deflect reality.

In his book Language as Symbolic Action (1966), Burke defined humankind as a "symbol using animal" (p. 3). This definition of man, he argued, means that "reality" has actually "been built up for us through nothing but our symbol system" (p. 5). Without our encyclopedias, atlases, and other assorted reference guides, we would know little about the world that lies beyond our immediate sense experience. What we call "reality," Burke stated, is actually a "clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present . . . a construct of our symbol systems" (p. 5). College students wandering from class to class, from English literature to sociology to biology to calculus, encounter a new reality each time they enter a classroom; the courses listed in a university's catalogue "are in effect but so many different terminologies" (p. 5). It stands to reason then that people who consider themselves to be Christian, and who internalize that religion's symbol system, inhabit a reality that is different from the one of practicing Buddhists, or Jews, or Muslims. The same would hold true for people who believe in the tenets of free market capitalism or socialism, Freudian psychoanalysis or Jungian depth psychology, as well as mysticism or materialism. Each belief system has its own vocabulary to describe how the world works and what things mean, thus presenting its adherents with a specific reality (no page reference).

Later works

Burke was awarded the National Medal for Literature at the American Book Awards in 1981. According to the New York Times, April 20, 1981, 'The $15,000 award, endowed in memory of the late Harold Guinzberg, founder of the Viking Press, honors a living American writer for a distinguished and continuing contribution to American letters. '

His song "One Light in a Dark Valley" was later recorded by his grandson Harry Chapin.[1]

His work on criticism was a driving force for placing him back into the university spotlight. As a result, he was able to teach and lecture at various colleges, including Bennington College, while continuing his literary work. Many of Kenneth Burke's personal papers and correspondence are housed at Pennsylvania State University's Special Collections Library.

Publications

Poetry

• Book of Moments: Poems 1915-1954. Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1955.
• Collected Poems 1915–1967 (includes Book of Moments). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
• The Late Poems: 1968-1993 Attitudinizings Verse-wise, While Fending for One's Selph, and in a Style Somewhat Artificially Colloquial. 2005.

Fiction

• The White Oxen and Other Stories. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1924.
• The Complete White Oxen: Collected Short Fiction of Kenneth Burke, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968; includes The White Oxen and Other Stories. {Books}
• Here & Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke. 2005.

Non-fiction

• Counter-Statement. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931
  • 2nd ed. Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1953
  • Phoenix paperback, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957
  • paperback, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
• Towards a Better Life: Being a Series of Epistles, or Declamations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932
  • 2nd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
• Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. New York: New Republic, 1935
  • 2nd rev. ed., Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1954
  • paperback, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965
  • 3rd rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. (The 1954, 1965, and 1984 editions contain an appendix, "On Human Behavior, Considered 'Dramatistically'"; the 1965 and 1984 editions, an introduction by Hugh Dalziel Duncan; the 1984 edition, a new afterword, "Permanence and Change: In Retrospective Prospect)."
• Attitudes toward History (2 volumes). New York: New Republic, 1937
  • 2nd rev, ed., Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1959
  • Beacon paperback, Boston: Beacon Press, 1961
  • 3rd rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. (The 1984 edition contains a new afterword, "Attitudes toward History: In Retrospective Prospect.")
• The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941; 2nd ed., 1967
  • revised abridged edition, Vintage paperback, New York: Vintage Books, 1957
  • 3rd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
• A Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945; London: Dennis Dobson, 1947
  • 2nd ed., New York: George Braziller, 1955
  • Meridian paperback (together with A Rhetoric of Motives), Cleveland & New York: World Publishing Company, 1962
  • Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
• A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950
  • 2nd ed., New York: George Braziller, 1955
  • Meridian paperback (together with A Grammar of Motives), Cleveland & New York: World Publishing Company, 1962
  • Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
• The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961
  • Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.
• Perspectives by Incongruity (edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman, with the assistance of Barbara Karmiller), Midland paperback Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964
• Terms for Order (edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman, with the assistance of Barbara Karmiller), Midland paperback, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964
• Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
• Dramatism and Development (Heinz Werner Series, Vol. 6). Worcester, MA.: Clark University Press, 1972.
• On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows. (edited by William H. Rueckert and Angelo Bonadonna). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Letters

• The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981 (edited by Jay Paul). New York: Viking, 1988. ISBN 0-670-81336-2
• The Humane Particulars: The collected letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
• Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959-1987 (edited by William H. Rueckert). West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2003.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Kenneth Burke Society.

External links

Poems

• Kenneth Burke 1897-1993 at the Poetry Foundation.

Books

• Resources and outlines on Kenneth Burke's corpus.

About

• Introduction to Burke
• KB Journal
• The Rhetorician Resource's Kenneth Burke page

Etc.

• The Kenneth Burke Society

• Complete text and audio of Burke's Drew Seminary Lecture on a Theory of Terms