Did Kenneth Burke, intellectual maverick, accidentally create cultural studies?
At the age of 20, Kenneth Burke left academic life for good; or so he thought. “It is now time for me to quit college,” he announced to a friend, “and begin studying.”
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Writings by and About Kenneth Burke
So he dropped out of Columbia University, and right into the heart of the Greenwich Village avant garde.
Burke (1897-1993) soon made a mark with his poetry, fiction, and essays. In 1924, he published the first English translation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a version W. H. Auden later called definitive. A few years later, with the money from a literary prize, Burke built a small farmhouse in Andover, N.J. There, he grew vegetables and chopped wood to heat the place, which had no electricity or plumbing. Burke joked that he was the king of the Agro-Bohemians.
In that setting, one of the most curious episodes in American intellectual history took place. The books that Kenneth Burke started writing from his rustic hideaway -- titles such as Attitudes Toward History (1938), The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), and The Rhetoric of Religion (1962) -- often puzzled his contemporaries. But in recent years, critics have read them with something like deja vu: Burke’s literary analysis extends to the most far-reaching speculations about those familiar topics in contemporary theory: language, power, and identity.
Although Burke did eventually return to the classroom, as a visiting professor of literature at various colleges (still without a B.A., much less a Ph.D.), he never quite fit into academe. At the peak of his career, a sympathetic critic wrote that Burke “has no field, unless it be Burkology.” Today, he would be said to be “doing theory.” And the steady output of books, dissertations, and journal articles about his work makes clear that Burkology is now an established specialty.
Since his death eight years ago, academic presses have been publishing work on “KB” (as friends and scholars alike call him) at an impressive rate. In 1997, the centenary of his birth was marked by the appearance of Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing With the Moderns, 1915-1931 (University of Wisconsin Press) -- the first installment of a projected three-volume intellectual biography by Jack Selzer, an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. A collection of papers, Kenneth Burke and the 21st Century (State University of New York Press, 1998), reflects the activity of the Kenneth Burke Society, which sponsors a triennial conference drawing more than 150 scholars. And Ross Wolin, an assistant professor of humanities at Boston University, offers a survey of KB’s career as theorist in a forthcoming book, The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke (University of South Carolina Press, July).
All of that may be the tip of the iceberg. Burke’s complete oeuvre fills a bookshelf, but there’s more to come. Literary historians are slowly wending their way to the Kenneth Burke Papers at Penn State, which holds more than half a century of KB’s correspondence with literary figures such as Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Allen Tate, Ralph Ellison, and Susan Sontag. His estate is preparing an edition of Burke’s collected poetry.
In the fall of 2002, the University of South Carolina Press will publish a collection of his correspondence with a fellow New Jersey modernist, William Carlos Williams. And a sizable volume of Burke’s later theoretical essays is due sometime next year from the University of California Press, under the title On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows.
But perhaps the biggest development of all concerns a Burke project that scholars have analyzed for years, without ever quite getting to read: an unpublished treatise called A Symbolic of Motives. The third part of a trilogy Burkeans sometimes call the “Motivorum,” it was to have been the culmination of the theoretical system he called “dramatism.” The first two volumes of the series were in print by 1950 -- and for decades, Burke announced the final book as “forthcoming.”
“It has a mythic quality about it,” says Mr. Selzer. “It’s kind of become the academic equivalent of an urban legend.” As with any such legend, there are debunkers. An entry in the soon-to-be-published Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism flatly states that “A Symbolic of Motives was never written.”
News flash: The Symbolic actually exists. You can even read a little of it in a recent collection, Unending Conversations: New Writings by and About Kenneth Burke (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), edited by Greig Henderson and David Cratis Williams. According to an essay in that volume by William Rueckert, a professor emeritus of English at SUNY-Geneseo, the unfinished, 269-page manuscript was found in Burke’s farmhouse in 1995. (Mr. Rueckert, often considered the dean of Burke scholarship, prepared the forthcoming collection On Human Nature and is now working on an edition of the Symbolic.) A companion essay by Mr. Williams, an assistant professor of speech communication at the University of Missouri at Rolla, uses Burke’s correspondence to trace the project’s tortuous history -- its endless delays reflecting both conceptual problems and the less philosophical varieties of procrastination.
The Symbolic marks one turning point in KB’s thinking, and promises to be a touchstone for scholars. During the 1920’s, Burke advocated “art for art’s sake": the doctrine (tres bohemian, at the time) that aesthetic values were utterly distinct from political, religious, or economic ones. His earliest critical essays analyzed the formal qualities of creative works -- their imagery and the rhythms of their language. But throughout the Great Depression, Burke paid ever more attention to the rhetorical dimension of writing: how texts hold readers’ interest, persuading them to see the world in a particular way.
Not all of his examples were literary. Burke’s most famous essay from the 1930’s was a close reading of Mein Kampf, an effort to understand Hitler’s appeal to Germans by examining his memoir’s style and narrative flow.
By the 1940’s, Burke was working out a general theory of how people use language -- and how the vocabularies they select in order to make sense of the world come to dominate them. (Someone who finds psychoanalytic ideas useful for understanding a particular nightmare might soon start having nothing but Freudian dreams.) Burke borrowed ideas from Thorstein Veblen, George Herbert Mead, and dozens of other thinkers. A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) contained long digressions on psychology, philosophy, and legal theory.
Literary scholars who admired Burke’s essays on Flaubert or Mann often found his later work bewildering. They complained that his ideas about “symbolic action” could apply just as easily to advertising campaigns as to The Divine Comedy. In other words, Burke may have accidentally created cultural studies.
With the Symbolic, Burke announced that he would return from the heights of abstraction to the analysis of literary works. His philosophical speculations (despite seeming to run off in 20 directions simultaneously) would reveal how a poem or play held together as a unique object. In his article in Unending Conversations, SUNY’s Mr. Rueckert includes a table of contents for the Symbolic showing that it was a structured argument, not just a heap of notes. “He kept rewriting,” Mr. Rueckert says, “but couldn’t bring it together. He hit some conceptual roadblocks along the way. After a while, I think he just ran out of energy.”
David E. Blakesley, director of professional writing in the English department at Purdue University at West Lafayette, suspects that Burke’s years as a wandering scholar distracted him from the Symbolic. “While writing the earlier books,” he notes, “Burke led a pretty settled life, whether on the farm in Andover or teaching at Bennington [College]. Then, in the 60’s, he started getting invitations from all over the place -- Harvard, Palo Alto, wherever. He liked having an audience for his work, but I think it meant he lost momentum on the Symbolic.” Even so, Mr. Blakesley, who is also an official of the Kenneth Burke Society, is glad to have the traveling theorist’s posthumous work available. He hopes to include more extracts from the manuscript in a forthcoming collection of papers from the society’s 1999 conference.
Mr. Selzer, now at work on the second volume of his Burke biography, contemplates the Symbolic with a jaundiced eye. “People think of Burke primarily as a system-builder, creating this big encyclopedic philosophy of language and literature,” he says. “And some of them want this book to be the part that will bring everything together. But I don’t see the trilogy as the be-all and end-all of KB’s work. I prefer to see his career as much more heterogeneous and fragmented. The Symbolic is interesting, but it’s not the only thing to study.”
While some Burkologists work out the architecture of his system, other scholars are looking at Burke’s dialogue with his peers. Ann George, an assistant professor of English at Texas Christian University, is at work on a new edition of Permanence and Change (1935) -- the crucial early theoretical work in which Burke shifted away from literary analysis towards what a later generation would call semiotics.
Students of his work have long been aware that the author tinkered with the book when he reissued it, in the 1950’s. As he later put it, an emphasis on “community” and “communication” had led him to advocate a related but more controversial term, namely “communism.” (Although never actually a member of the party, Burke remained close to it throughout the Depression.)
But Ms. George wants to do more with her edition than restore the passages that Burke discretely self-censored during the McCarthy era. As a graduate student, she found the book dazzling yet perplexing (a common response upon first reading Burke). With the encouragement of Mr. Selzer, she searched the Penn State archive to see what KB had written to friends about Permanence and Change. “In no time, I was hooked,” she says. “I had never done archival research before and wasn’t especially interested in Burke until that point. But the correspondence just drew me in. It’s like a Who’s Who of American literary modernism. A lot of the things that most puzzled me about the book started to make sense, given who he was talking to.”
Ms. George discovered that whole pages of Permanence and Change had first been sketched in Burke’s reviews of now-forgotten authors. The book’s weird energy and somewhat puzzling structure were a byproduct of extensive dialogues with other thinkers. His theories of communication make more sense if you understand whom he was communicating with at the time.
“Burke once said he was not a joiner of clubs,” Ms. George says. “Scholars quote that a lot. I guess it’s in keeping with the image we have of him as a loner. But when you get into the archive, what you find is that he was actually plugged into the most remarkable set of intellectual networks. You see him writing for Marxist publications, but also in touch with the Agrarians who wrote I’ll Take My Stand [a defense of Southern traditionalism]. He’s interested in psychoanalysis, but he’s also talking with the neo-Aristotelians who were at the University of Chicago.
“If anything, I think that Burke actually joined as many clubs as he could. We think of him as this hermit thinking complex thoughts in the wilderness, but that’s not the whole story.”
Ms. George’s dissertation on Permanence and Change is the foundation of her annotated edition, which will fill in the missing historical links.
There is plenty of archival work left for Burke researchers. Penn State’s holdings were expanded in 1997 by the addition of correspondence from the last three decades of his life. A friend, the poet Howard Nemerov, once described KB as “this mind which can’t stop exploding.”
Scholars do not yet have access to Burke’s unpublished manuscripts and working notes, which fill more than a dozen boxes, according to his son Anthony Burke, an astronomy professor at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia.
Pressed for a date when those materials will be made available to the public, representatives of Burke’s literary estate are politely evasive. But the boon to scholarship will be considerable. Alongside his Symbolic, Burke worked on books (evidently never finished) about Shakespeare and Coleridge. He produced an edition of Jeremy Bentham’s Table of the Springs of Action -- a curious treatise in which the British founder of utilitarianism tried to diagram all the basic motives governing human action. And over the years, Burke worked on a sort of memoir of his own intellectual development.
It is anyone’s guess what other provocative items will be found in the literary remains.
Meanwhile, the secondary literature grows steadily, and preparations continue for the 2002 conference of the Kenneth Burke Society. Jack Selzer is in no hurry to see any more abandoned projects from KB’s last few decades. He hopes to finish the next volume of his biography within a year or so -- tracing Burke’s literary and philosophical development to the end of the 1930’s. “I’ve learned one thing from this, if nothing else,” he says. “Never get involved with studying a thinker who lived to be more than 95 years old.”
WRITINGS BY AND ABOUT KENNETH BURKE
The best introduction to Kenneth Burke’s work may be the collections Perspectives by Incongruity and Terms for Order (Indiana University Press, both 1964), edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman. Drawing on KB’s poetry and fiction as well as his critical writings, those anthologies provide a condensed but rich overview, and they include important essays not available elsewhere. Both are long out of print.
The University of California Press, however, keeps all of Burke’s major theoretical books available. A more recent selection of his work can be found in On Symbols and Society (University of Chicago Press, 1989), edited by Joseph R. Gusfield, a volume in the Heritage of Sociology series. And in a different vein, see the running intellectual autobiography in Paul Jay’s edition of The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981 (Viking, 1988). Indispensable to the Burkologist, that volume also presents the moving record of a lifelong friendship.
A number of dissertations and monographs on Burke appeared during his lifetime. In 1984, scholars formed the Kenneth Burke Society, which maintains a Web page at http://www.home.duq.edu/~thames/kennethburke/Default.htm. Posthumous secondary literature on Burke includes the following titles:
The Elements of Dramatism, by David Blakesley (Longman, Fall 2001).
Encounters With Kenneth Burke, by William H. Rueckert (University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Extensions of the Burkean System, edited by James W. Chesebro (University of Alabama Press, 1993).
Implicit Rhetoric: Kenneth Burke’s Extension of Aristotle’s Concept of Entelechy, by Stan A. Lindsay (University Press of America, 1998).
Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: Rhetoric in Transition, edited by Bernard L. Brock (University of Alabama Press, 1995).
Kenneth Burke and the Conversation After Philosophy, by Timothy W. Crusius (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).
Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process, by C. Allen Carter (University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).
Kenneth Burke and the 21st Century, edited by Bernard L. Brock (State University of New York Press, 1998).
Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing With the Moderns, 1915-1931, by Jack Selzer (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology, by Stephen Bygrave (Routledge, 1993).
Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism, by Robert Wess (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke, by Ross Wolin (University of South Carolina, July).
Unending Conversations: New Writings by and About Kenneth Burke, edited by Greig E. Henderson and David Cratis Williams (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001).
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