Kenneth Burke

Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.Personal HistoryHe was born on May 5 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and 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, despite hints that he would be asked to join the school's faculty.[citation needed] 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 Batterman, with whom he had three daughters, the late feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock (1922-1987), musician (Jeanne) Elspeth Hart (b. 1920), and writer and poet France Burke (b. ~1925). He would later marry her sister Elizabeth Batterman 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. 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.[1]
In later life his New Jersey farm was a popular summer retreat for his extended family, as reported by his grandson Harry Chapin. He died of heart failure at his home in Andover, New Jersey.[2]
[edit] InfluencesBurke, like many twentieth 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), Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, Rene Girard, Fredric Jameson, 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.
[edit] PhilosophyBurke defined the rhetorical function of language as "a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." He defined "man" as "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.
In Burke's philosophy, social interaction and communication should be understood in terms of a pentad, which includes act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. He proposed that most social interaction and communication can be approached as a form of drama whose outcomes are determined by ratios between these five pentadic elements. This has become known as the "dramatistic pentad." The pentad is grounded in his dramatistic method, which sees the relationship between life and theater as literal rather than metaphorical: for Burke, all the world really is a stage. 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, 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.
[edit] Later worksBurke wrote one novel, Towards a Better Life, which won the National Medal for Literature in 1980. He also wrote the song "One Light in a Dark Valley," 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.
Principal worksCounter-Statement (1931) Permanence and Change (1935) Attitudes Toward History (1937) Philosophy of Literary Form (1939) A Grammar of Motives (1945) A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) The Rhetoric of Religion (1961) Language as Symbolic Action (1966) Dramatism and Development (1972) Here and Elsewhere (2005) Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives (2006) Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare (2007) Full bibliography of Burke's writings
[edit] CorrespondenceJay, Paul, editor, The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981, New York: Viking, 1988, ISBN 0-670-81336-2