The Philosophy of Literary Form
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
4. Secondary Readings
Kenneth
Burke. The opening argument to The
Philosophy of Literary Form.
Key Terms (tags): perspective by
incongruity, identification, dream vision, ambiguity
Supporting References:
- Everett, Nicholas. "Burke, Kenneth." The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. : Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference. 2003. Date Accessed 22 Aug. 2013
The following
focuses on the author and not the text.
“Burke, Kenneth (1897
–1986), was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and educated at Ohio
State and Columbia universities. His wide intellectual interests and
talents were evident from the start: he studied Marx and Freud; did
research for the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation (1926 –7)
and editorial work for the Bureau of Social Hygiene (1928); was music
critic for the Dial
(1927 –9) and the Nation (1934 –6); and translated
several German books (including Mann's Death in Venice,
1925; revised edn., 1970). His first book of critical essays,
Counter-Statement (1931), was shortly followed by his only
novel, Towards a Better Life (1932). Since 1938 he taught
and lectured at several universities and published many critical
books. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1935)
was an attempt to reconcile his growing Marxist sympathies with his
earlier aestheticism. His search for an all-inclusive intellectual
framework, however, culminated in ‘dramatism’, the purposive
theory of language described in A Grammar of Motives (1945)
and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), which sees—and
analyses—all forms of language as revelations of motive.
“Burke began
writing as a poet but has been much more prolific, and widely read,
as a literary and philosophical critic. His poems are all lyrics, as
he defines the term: terse summaries of momentary moods and motives.
They are accessible, light, playful, and witty, despite their
frequently abstract and metaphysical themes; ‘ideally’, he says,
‘the complete lyrist would love ideas at least as strongly as
sensations, and preferably more’. His criticism has often been
attacked for its proliferation of abstract terms, abstruse arguments,
and frivolous associative leaps; but his analysis of rhetoric is now
seen to have anticipated the cross-disciplinary and highly
theoretical work of Michel Foucault and other post-structuralists.
“See Collected Poems, 1915–67 (Berkeley, Calif., and
London, 1968); The Complete White Oxen: Collected Shorter Fiction
(Berkeley, 1968); The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in
Symbolic Action (Berkeley, 1941; revised edn., New York, 1957;
London, 1959); and for assessments of all his writing, Critical
Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924–1966, ed. William Rueckert
(Minneapolis, 1969).”
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