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The bronze bust of Kenneth Burke sculpted by Virginia Molnar Burks is housed in the PatteeLibrary at the Pennsylvania State University. Photos are of the clay bust from which the bronzewas cast. Taken in 1985 and copyrighted by Virginia Burks, they are used with her permission.V

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May 1996 2 The Kenneth Burke Society Newsletter

Robert WessKenneth Burke: Rhetoric,Subjectivity, PostmodernismCambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996pp. xx + 262cloth $30.00paper $15.95

Michael FeehanUniversity of ArkansasSchool of Law

R obert Wess’ Kenneth Burke performs two useful acts, providing (1) a new chrono-

logical study of Burke’s career and (2) a studyof Burke’s theory of selfhood. The first of thesewill be valuable, perhaps indispensable, foreveryone interested in Burke; the second, thereal meat of the book, will probably appeal to amuch smaller audience. Wess builds on whilegoing far beyond Armin Paul Frank’s Twaynevolume in describing the development ofBurke’s career. The sheer size of the bookallows Wess greater breadth than Frank couldachieve and the explosion of Burke scholarshipallows Wess valuable new depths of analysis.More importantly, Wess’ thesis claim thatBurke’s development was driven by his strugglesto define a “rhetoric of the subject” creates anunprecedented revision of the “curve” of

Burke’s career, identifying the “Dialectic ofConstitutions” section of A Grammar of Motivesas KB’s consummative moment.

This important and provocative thesis arisesthrough Wess’ systematic comparisons betweenKB and French criticism of the Althusser-Foucault brand. Burkeans will be most familiarwith that brand of criticism through the work ofFredric Jameson. Indeed Jameson’s nearlyubiquitous presence throughout the book sug-gests that Jameson’s “comments” on KB werethe initiating moment for Wess’ whole project.For Wess, Althusser, et al. develop a theory ofselfhood which avoids both the transcendentala priori of Kant and the rigidities of OrthodoxMarxist historicism, a la Lukacs. Burke appearsas conducting much the same kind of investiga-tion two to three decades before the French.

The Kenneth Burke Society Newsletter 3 May 1996

Subjectivity, Rhetoric,

Postmodernism

Wess’ argument is at once stimulating anddifficult; we may hope that the book generates agood deal of co-haggling. Unfortunately, theemergence of such a co-haggling may be slowedby the not inconsiderable difficulty of readingthe book.

Readers already comfortable with the langu-age of French criticism-in-translation will havelittle difficultly with book. However, readers notfamiliar with that language may find the terrainbumpy, especially with Wess’ first chapter, hisfocal theoretical analysis. Much of that difficultycan be avoided by simply beginning with chapter

two on Counter-Statement (CS). Then, chaptersthree through eight each discuss one of Burke’sbooks, moving in chronological order fromPermanence and Change (PC) to The Rhetoricof Religion (RR). Chapter three includes anvaluable study of the recently published“Auscultation, Creation, Revision.” Chaptereight continues beyond RR to survey the finalfour decades of KB’s work. Wess thus providesthe most extensive and most fully elaboratedsurvey of KB’s career yet available.

Readers who choose to skip chapter onewill not thereby avoid all contact with pseudo-French discourse. Because Wess’ analysis ofBurke’s career emerges through his comparisonof KB to Althusser, the translator’s languagealternates continuously with the received rheto-ric of academic America. Sometimes transitions

between the two can have an effect not unlikereading through a kaleidoscope. For instance, weenter a paragraph on p. 127 with:

Proportionalizing makes invention possibleat the root level of hierarchy by makinghierarchy an issue rather than a faitaccompli. In proportionalizing, there arehierarchies but none can ever stand as thehierarchy. The real, in rhetorical realism,imposes itself in necessitating hierarchy,but not in necessitating any particular one.

The paragraph continues for eight more lines be-fore concluding with: “The act adds something

to history—for example, the invention of thesubject of individualism and the re-hierarchizingit entailed.” (My marginal note has, “Oh.”) Thefollowing two-sentence paragraph tells us thatwe have just passed through the heart of Wess’thesis: “The subject, in short, is formed andtransformed in the reality of rhetoric. The act isa rhetoric of the subject.” Wess argues that it ishere, in The Philosophy of Literary Form, in hisdiscussion of the proportional strategy in sym-bolic action that Burke arrives at the outercircumference of his most important work, “TheDialectic of Constitutions.”

Reading this book can feel weirdly dream-like as we move in out of Wess’ two quite diffe-rent languages. Happily, the reader who presseson will find the re-appearances of academicprose to be sufficiently many and sufficiently


expansive to make it possible to effectivelyengage with Wess’ analysis of KB’s develop-ment. (Reading chapters two through eight willalso teach by immersion how to read the pseudo-French, just in case one is inclined to attemptchapter one). Ultimately, it is Wess’ thesis, nothis cross-linguistic discourse which sets thisbook among the most important studies of KB’sachievements. It is through his comparison ofKB with the French thinkers that Wess discovershis intriguing new chart of KB’s career.

More Rhetoric,argument of Wess’ that KB’s career can best beunderstood as a progress toward and a driftingaway from the transhistorical, from a “history ofsubjects.” Throughout his career, KB struggledto reconcile permanence and change, the a prioriself and the self emergent through action. In CSand PC, the a priori won out in a rhetoric of thebody as permanent source of motives and sym-bols. With ATH, KB began to move away fromthe settled world of the a priori toward a newrhetorical realist view of selfhood. On this viewATH cannot be treated as merely a practicalappendix to the theory presented in PC. “ATHis not an application of an ideal to reality but atheoretical reorientation in which the tensionbetween PC’s constructionist and essentialistsides is resolved in favor of the constructionist”(84). The term “constructionist” is Wess pre-ferred translation of KB’s “proportionalizing,”a translation which at once aligns Wess withAlthusser et al. and allows Wess to identify GM

a nutshell, is that contemporary theory needsBurke’s rhetorical realism of the act to preservethe theoretical gains of recent decades by ward-ing off the rhetorical idealism that sometimesthreatens to undermine them” (x). Idealismthreatens most immediately through the ortho-dox Marxism of Lukacs; the corrective appearsin Althusser and his school. In a nutshell, Lukacsallows for a subjecthood existing prior to and tosome extent outside history, where Althusserinsists on a subjecthood wholly emergentthrough history. “For Lukacs, history is an effectof a narratively centered transcendental subject;for Althusser, the subject is a decentered effectof ideology, a transhistorical structure in history.Lukacs gives us a subject of history; Althusser, ahistory of subjects” (17). The linking termbetween Althusser and KB is “transhistorical,”an individual to be sure, but not a soul-like entityexisting beyond what Wess calls history.

What will most interest Burkologists is this

The arena in which Wess conducts hiscombat is summarized in the title to his firstchapter, “Ideology as Rhetoric.” Wess wants toshow that modern rhetoric, especially in KB’sformulation, can revitalize discussions of ideo-logy. In particular, Wess is speaking to FredricJameson and his community in hopes of showingthat they have misunderstood KB and havethereby missed their best opportunity to enlargethe theories of subjecthood developed byAlthusser and Foucault. For those who wish totake Marxism seriously in the post-Cold Warera, Wess’ argument will be crucial. Wess’ arenaof argumentation will be most familiar to stu-dents of KB as combat between rhetoricalrealism and idealism with both Burke and Wessplumping for realism. “Chapter 1’s argument, in


as KB’s paramount achievement. “GM’s dialecticof constitutions is the text that underwrites . . .a rhetoric of the subject. From a bird’s-eyeviewpoint, our narrative of Burke’s career chartshis steps to this constitutional model and his latersteps away from it, although a few years beforehis death in 1993 he may have contemplatedreturning to this model or a revised version ofit” (5). For Wess, KB’s insistence on the activenature of the Constitution and of the SupremeCourt’s constitutional interpretations creates adecentered world, one in which the rules of thegame are constantly changing. “The constitutiveact of changing the rules of the game in the playof the game theorizes the invention and reinven-tion of orthodoxies and their subjects. . . .Subjects are invented in constitutive acts. The actadds something irreducible to its antecedents”(145-46). KB’s theory of constitutions providesjust the kind of dialectic, the comic interplayof expectations and frustrations, that makes

Court is repeatedly transforming the rule. TheConstitution is thus a game in which transform-ing the rules of the game is a central part of thegame” (26). The concept of constitutions linksthe idea of history to the idea individuality, alinkage which revises our post-Enlightenmentbelief in autonomous individuals. “To accentuatehis location of the new in the act rather than theagent, Burke takes care to stress the act’s inde-pendence of the agent, exhibiting in doing so hisrecognition of a tendency in his audience toassume that any reference to action presupposesan autonomous agent as its authentic origin”(l46). Yet, Burke does not wholly abandon theidea of autonomy; he places autonomy in historythrough a rhetoric of motives. “Rhetoricalautonomy is beginning and end, both originationand re-origination, a molten liquidity that canharden but that can always be agonisticallymelted down and transformed. Autonomy is apotentiality that histoxy creates and that is

possible a rhetoricizing of ideology. Wess givesto KB’s theory of constitutions the weight thatKB himself insisted on.

Burke’s theory of constitutions arises out ofthe conversational model developed in ThePhilosophy of Literary Form. “The horizon ofBurke’s dialectic, in other words, is the horizonof the conversation. There is no origin or telos,only a middle” (154). Our tribe’s conversationprecedes our arrival and survives our passing.“Cultures, of course, construct acts for us priorto our arrival in history in media res, and theylabor mightily to suit us to perform them, but noact is fixed forever. Constituted in history, actscan always be agonistically melted down andreconstituted” (146). The U. S. Constitutionserves as representative anecdote, because theSupreme Court is always making it new, chang-ing the rules during the play of the game. “TheConstitution says what the Court reads it assaying. The Constitution is the rule, but the

Subjectivity, Postmodernismactualized in the rhetorical invention of newsubject positions, often at great risk to theinventors” (27). The constitutional analysis ofGM and A Rhetoric of Motives completes theconversational model of PLF, allowing us to seehow the sheer middleness of our tribal conversa-tion can be transformed into a complete dramawith a beginning, middle, and end throughsymbolic action.

Importantly, this argument allows Wess tosee KB’s non-publication of A Symbolic ofMotives as arising directly from the writing ofGM and RM. As he composed GM and RM, KBdiscovered that SM was unnecessary, its goal ofanalyzing the transhistorical self already com-pleted in the preceding two volumes. KB then,drifted away from his central work into the logo-logical investigations emergent in and flowingfrom RR. Wess here aligns in interesting wayswith Greig Henderson’s Kenneth Burke: Lang-uage and Literature as Symbolic Action.#


ContemporaryEuropean

Thought

T hat there are intriguing parallels between the thinking of the contemporary Europeans

(here Habermas, Grassi, Foucault, and Derrida)and that rhetorical thought is in a period of tran-sition is not to be denied. We can be accordinglygrateful that Bernard Brock has assembled essaysby a group of locally distinguished scholars dedi-cated to addressing these two circumstances. Al-though Brock’s collection does not pretend to bea textbook, it invites comparison with the wellknown text by Foss, Foss, and Trapp. This latterwork includes but goes well beyond each of thefeatured thinkers in the Brock collection. It does

so however without benefit of the specializedauthors mobilized by Brock and consequentlypays for its admirable scope by a certain lack ofdepth. The Brock collection would therefore bea valuable addition to the reading list for anygraduate course in modern rhetorical theory.

Brock’s Burke (and William Rueckertreminds us there are many Burkes) is presentedin the first chapter and sets the stage for muchthat follows. Kenneth Burke is therein presentedas a primarily rhetorical thinker who has evolvedthrough three distinct phases. Burke, arguesBrock, began as a critical realist and successivelyevolved into a period of conceptualism andfinished by embracing symbolic coherence. Thisschema is no doubt a useful pedagogic deviseand also serves to point toward a certain unity ofthought between the sage of Andover and the

What Brock claims for Burke is more true of theEuropeans who under the influence of FerdinandDeSaussure severed the connections betweenlanguage and reality, and under the influence ofNietzsche and his offspring adopted a rhetoricalworld view. What connects Burke to the Euro-peans is the questions he asked not the answershe gave. Burke in this volume suffers the samefate that befell Albert Einstein who was perhapsthe last great classical (Newtonian) physicist andnot the author of the new physics. Burke likeEinstein saw the flaws in the prevailing systemsof thought, dealt with them profoundly in anattempt to save them, but like the physicist is alltoo often assimilated to the revolutionaries whofollowed. Whether presenting Burke as a proto-postmodern does him a favor or not, of course,depends upon what one takes to be the fate of

influential contemporary Europeans. It is truethat Burke’s thought evolved and that his earlythinking involved intense consideration of therelations between language and reality. It is alsotrue that Burke’s later thinking concentrated onthe nature of language as such. I submit, how-ever, that Burke never abandoned his doctrine ofrecalcitrance, never took the Sophists veryseriously (his admiration for Nietzsche notwith-standing) and hence never embraced the rhetor-ical world view to the extent that Brock claims.K.B. complained frequently in his later yearsabout the tendency to over-rhetoricize his work.


that movement. For my own part I take post-modernism to be a profound, productive, andplausible (particularly for rhetoricians) mistake.

Unfortunately Mark McPhail in his “Coherenceas Representative Anecdote in the Rhetorics ofKenneth Burke and Ernesto Grassi” followsBrock’s lead. I have myself written of “mathe-matical motifs” in Burke’s work, so I am not in-sensitive to the coherentist tendencies in the corpus.Still granted Burke’s exploitation of linguisticambiguities, of perspectives by incongruity, andhis doctrine of recalcitrance, it is hard to arguethat he finished with a fixed and final notion ofthe pre-eminence of coherence. That doctrinemay do much to explain Grassi, and McPhaildoes offer perspicacious insights into the Italianrhetorician, but it is not an adequate representa-tive anecdote for Burke at any stage of the game.

Thomas Farrell’s essay on Burke andHabermas is masterful—this in spite of the factthat the ponderous Germanic theorizing of theone (something only an argument theorist couldlove) fits very poorly with the Yankee playful-ness of the other. But as Farrell’s essay makesclear behind the differences in style and proce-dure both scholars sought to secure the “continu-ing conversation,” the civilized public argumentfrom its detractors. Farrell is a good example ofthe increasing tendency of critics to overshadowand overwhelm the objects of their criticism. Inchoosing to append to his essay a critique ofRonald Reagan’s speech on the occasion of theChallenger disaster as an example of Burke-Habermas approaches to the analysis of a publicevent, Farrell succeeds only in reminding usof the disastrously low level to which rhetoric in

Kenneth Burke andContemporary European Thought:Rhetoric in TransitionEdited by Bernard L. BrockTuscaloosa:University of Alabama Press, 1995pp. xii + 279cloth $43.95

Trevor MeliaProfessor EmeritusUniversity of Pittsburgh


parted company with Foucault and other post-modernists. It is on the basis of this dispositionthat Blair characterizes Burke as a humanistcontra Foucault’s post-humanism. In an other-wise subtle and nuanced essay Blair allegesthat whereas Burke’s writings were quicklywelcomed by rhetoric scholars, those ofFoucault face stiff resistance. My impressionsare quite otherwise. Burke’s work, it seems tome, suffered years of hostility, followed by acouple of decades (two or three instances to thecontrary notwithstanding) in which his termino-logy was appropriated to disguise nearly mori-bund neo-Aristotelian scholarship. It is only inthe last couple of decades that Burke has re-ceived care-ful and competent treatment withinthe discipline. Foucault, on the other hand,seems to me to be making inroads with remark-able rapidity, not least because he commandsthe respect of exegetes of the calibre of CaroleBlair.

public affairs has fallen in America. Farrell, oneof the best and brightest of contemporary argumenttheorists, here deploys his considerable analyticskills, his verbal dexterity, his insight into Burkeand Habermas in critique of a speech written byPeggy Noonan (an obviously bright, cynical, andsold out version of many of his own graduate stu-dents) to help Reagan paper over the tragic resultsof a misconceived and vaguely insulting PR missionprematurely scheduled by NASA, at least in part,to provide ammunition for the forthcoming Stateof the Union address by the President. No matterhow well this appended critique illustrates theBurke-Habermas motifs that are the main subjectof this essay (and it does), it does so by profferingto Reagan-Noonan the sort of deference Burke,at least, would reserve for Shakespeare, Keats,and Whitman (white males all, of course). Mean-while, Farrell fails to deliver the invective theChallenger affair deserves and from KB wouldsurely have got.

Carole Blair evades the task of relating thebiographies of her chosen subjects (Burke andFoucault) to their oeuvres, a task that the otheressayists in this volume do discharge, on thegrounds that to do so would be to violateFoucaultian imperatives. The point is well takenand yet, from a non-Foucaultian stand point,such a project would probably shed more lighton Foucault’s writing than is the case for anyother of the thinkers featured therein. Such anundertaking would be a very delicate task butwell within the capabilities of Blair. Rather thanviolate Foucaultian sensibilities Blair choosesinstead to discuss the different dispositions ofthe notion “author” by Burke and Foucault.That choice is critical. Perhaps no other conceptcould so clearly show the cleavages betweenthe two. Burke recognized the problems withthe idea of autonomous agent more even thanBlair allows. He nevertheless retained the idea,critical to his notion of Dramatism, and thereby

James Chesebro takes on the daunting task ofmaking sense of two thinkers as complex as Burkeand Derrida within the confines of a singlechapter. Inevitably there is much to quarrel with,but again the essay is far superior to thosetypical of Foss, Foss, and Trapp. My greatestmisgiving is about the move whereby Chesebrocompares Burke’s derivative notion (from KarlMannheim, I believe) of “debunking” and makesit directly analogous to Derrida’s “deconstruction.”Debunking is a minor term in the Burke corpus,hardly adequate to account for Derrida’s titularterm. In any case, to do Derrida justice, “de-bunking” carries with it little of the subtlety andnone of the painstaking attention to detail that“deconstruction” actually involves. Moreover,debunking smacks of the journalistic context inwhich it was frequently found. Whatever one’sdiscontents with deconstruction (and mine areconsiderable), it must be granted that it is theresult of serious philosophical analysis and

Contemporary European


should be treated as such. Chesebro’s applica-tion of Burke-Derrida analysis to Charles Dar-win, by way of illustration, is a useful deviceand produces a provocative “take” on the greatnaturalist. Again, as with other essays in thevolume, there is the postmodern attempt, ofwhich Derrida would have approved, to rejectrealism. In Chesebro’s hands Darwin’s Originsis read as a social construction (which it mani-festly is) but that is not all it is. Burke herewould part company with Derrida and Chesebrofor whatever his misgivings with realism toutecourt, KB never was incarcerated in the so-called“prison house of language.” Indeed Burke’s ownanalysis of Darwin makes the point that ultimatelyconfounds any attempt to assimilate the sage ofAndover to postmodernism. Using the pentad asa proportionalizing device in the Grammar,Burke indicates how each of the major philoso-phers can be shown to be featuring some ele-ments of the pentad at the expense of others.

Darwin, a scenic thinker par excellence, attemptssystematically to repress the claims of agent andpurpose with the result that those two factorsnecessarily get dealt with in demonstrably covertways. From the Burkeian point of view, insofaras Derrida deconstructs agent, he should besusceptible to the same sort of demonstration.This, in an otherwise fine essay, Chesebro failsto provide.

In the final essay in this collection CelesteMichelle Condit daringly reprises the book andadds commentary on the works of such thinkersas Heidegger and Baudrillard (and gets awaywith it), quite an accomplishment consideringthat her reprise covers ground already dealt withby names as locally resonant as Farrell, Blair,and Chesebro! The essay is mistressful—marredonly by the rampant and fashionable sexism thatbetrays her into putting an extended treatment ofthe work of Mary Daly in the context of dealingwith the likes of Burke, Derrida, Foucault,

Habermas, and Heidegger, and incidentallyindulging the lust for victimage that Burke sosteadfastly resisted. Nevertheless, Condit repairssome deficits left over from the previous essays,brilliantly summarizes the “linguistic reflexiv-ity” of the major figures with whom she deals,and generally comes closest to getting Burkeright. Condit also fills a gap in Burke scholarshipby reminding us just how important the generalsemanticists were to Burke’s philosophicaldevelopment. She does speak of Burke’s “anti-foundationalist epistemology” at the beginningof the essay, but by the end it is clear that sherecognizes that Burke’s position is much morecomplex than that. In fine, Condit’s dispositionof the major figures in contemporary rhetoric isdextrous and sure-footed enough to make thevolume worth buying for her essay alone.Condit here establishes herself as a leadingBurke scholar, a luminary in the discipline andperhaps beyond.#

Thought, Continued


On Kenneth Burke

T he very nature of this volume makes it a difficult book to review in any meaningful man-

ner. A collection of thirteen previously publishedessays, Landmark Essays on Kenneth Burke offersnothing new in Burkean studies other than editorBarry Brummett’s brief introduction to thevolume and an oddly ideosyncratic bibliography.Of course, the volume does not attempt to offeranything new; its value lies in its reproduction inaccessible form of significant essays designed tointroduce the reader to “what it means to beBurkean, to study Burke, and to use Burke indeveloping our understanding of the humancondition” (xi).

Who is this potential reader? Brummett caststhe net widely: “These essays are meant to be readby students, professors, the general public—byanyone who is one [sic] the move intellectually”

this volume but also similar volumes concerningspecific topics or periods in rhetorical theory andhistory, e.g., the rhetoric of science or classicalGreek rhetoric (the volume on Burke is the onlyone in the series focused on an individual theorist)—suggests much more than simply important orprovocative essays: it invokes a necessarily dia-lectical, indeed diachronic, perspective. “A land-mark,” Brummett writes, “is a prominent featureof the landscape that a traveller makes note of soas not to get lost when going into a wilderness.”Even more specifically, landmarks “are for theintrepid explorer who makes the path. If wewant to understand where we are and how weare moving, we must keep checking over ourshoulders to compare where we are with wherethe landmark is” (xvi). This notion of movementrelative to fixed reference points, regardless of

whether it embeds an assumption of progress orevolution toward some unstated telos or not,necessarily implies a diachronic orientation: “Alandmark is most often useful,” Brummett contin-ues, “when it is not where one is at present, whenit is where one was” (xvi). What this volume at-tempts, in other words, is to offer a series of more-or-less fixed reference points by which one maychart not only where Burkean scholarship was“in the beginning” but also where it is now (andhow it got here) as well as the trajectory of whereit may be heading “in the next century” (xvi).

Although this project of charting the course ofBurkean scholarship has utility, particularly forclassroom purposes, it is not only not feasiblewithout immediate limitations or parameters butit is also fraught with the peril of codifying thecourse of Burkean studies—past, present, and

(xix). That is a laudable aspiration, but givenBurke’s own failure to catch on in any significantway with the “general public,” one must suspectthat the primary readership for this book is a fairlysmall body of (probably graduate) students, theirprofessors, and, maybe, a scattered few additionalinterested academicians and scholars who do not“specialize” in Burke. For the purposes of thisreview, at any rate, I am operating on the presup-position that the ultimate value of this volumelies in how well it might function as a text, orsupplementary text, for a (probably graduate)class focusing to a large degree on Burke’s works.

As its title announces, the volume is a collec-tion of “landmark” essays on Burke. In his intro-duction, Brummett notes that the term “landmark”—derived from title of the Hermagoras Press’“Landmark Essays” series, including not only

Landmark Essays


Landmark EssaysOn Kenneth BurkeEdited by Barry BrummertDavis, California:Hermagoras Press, 1993pp. xix + 290paper $19.95

David Cratis WilliamsTruman State University(Northeast Missouri State University)

future—and concomitantly rigidifying thecourse of critical interpretations of Burke’sworks. Before addressing the limitations andpossible “dangers” of the volume, let me firstindicate what I see as valuable in the volume.

Whether or not one necessarily agrees thatall of the essays included in this volume areindeed “landmarks” or even among the mostsignificant essays on Burke, I believe that mostBurke scholars would agree that this is a collec-tion of credible essays, all of which are wellworth reading and pondering. The essays aredivided into three groupings: those which areoverviews and surveys, those which focus oncritical and philosophical issues, and thosewhich concern politics and intervention.

The five “survey” essays work to explicateand situate Burke’s contributions to diverse

“fields” of symbolic activity, such as rhetoric,literature, and sociology, as well as to convey asense of a “Burkean perspective” on the world.Marie Hochmuth Nichols’ “Kenneth Burke andthe ‘New Rhetoric’” (originally published in 1952)situates Burke’s work through A Rhetoric ofMotives (1950) in relation to fairly traditionalAristotelian approaches to rhetoric; Stanley EdgarHyman’s “Kenneth Burke and the Criticism ofSymbolic Action” (chapter ten of The ArmedVision, 1948) does much the same in relation to“modern literary criticism” for Burke through AGrammar of Motives (1945), and Michael A.Overington’s “Kenneth Burke and the Method ofDramatism” (1977) is a self-acknowledged“sociologically interested exposition of Burke’swork,” “offering a translation of his systematicwritings that makes sense to sociologists” (92).


Landmark Essays on Burke,

The other two overview essays are less dis-ciplinarily focused. “Pivotal Terms in the EarlyWorks of Kenneth Burke,” by Jane Blankenship,Edward Murphy, and Marie Rosenwasser (1974),explicates key terms in Burke’s works through APhilosophy of Literary Form (1941), developinga theoretical lexicon wherein Burke’s “termino-logical development can be traced” (71). In hisdelightful and delightfully insightful essay“Everything, Preferably All At Once: Coming toTerms with Kenneth Burke” (1971), Burke’slongtime friend, admirer, and critic, HowardNemerov, offers “a species of rhapsodic impres-sionism and imitation” through which to orientthe reader to Burke’s own orientation towardlanguage and the constitution of meaning (66).

Only two essays, both by communicationscholars, are included in the second section,focusing on “critical and philosophical issues.”Richard Gregg’s essay, “Kenneth Burke’sProlegomena to the Study of the Rhetoric of

Form” (1978) offers an explication of Burke’searly articulation of a psychology of form and itsimplications for rhetoric; James Chesebro’s“Epistemology and Ontology as DialecticalModes in the Writings of Kenneth Burke” (1988)offers an evolutionary reading of Burkeanthought which culminates in viewing the onto-logical and the epistemological as complemen-tary and constitutive functions of rhetoric.

The final section of the book, focusing on“politics and intervention,” consists of six fairlydiverse essays. William H. Rueckert’s “Towardsa Better Life Through Symbolic Action” (chap-ter two of Kenneth Burke and the Drama ofHuman Relations, 1963 and 1982) examinesBurke’s move from “his poetic career” in the1920s to “the field of social criticism andtheory” during the period from 1931 through1941 (155). Rueckert concludes that “Burkehopes to effect a cure for the technologicalpsychosis, directing the self away from the

universal holocaust which he envisions as theultimate end of the scientific orientation andtoward the better life of purified war which heenvisions as the ultimate goal of the poeticorientation” (177). In a general sense, the otheressays in this final section reflect the perspectivethat Burke’s orientation does have utility in thesocial and political realms, that there is a praxislurking in the Burkean corpus.

The selection from Hugh Dalziel Duncanentitled “Symbols in Society” (sections threethrough ten from the “Introduction” to Symbolsin Society, 1968) concerns “the structure andfunction of the act considered as dramatic inform and social in content” (179). In pursuingthis, Duncan weaves dramatism, symbolicinteractionism, and pragmatism into a socio-logical reading of humanity’s compulsion forvictimage. Dramatism, he concludes, offersperhaps the best prospect of social catharsis, of,in Burke’s phrase, the purification of war.

Leland M. Griffin’s essay, “A DramatisticTheory of the Rhetoric of Movements” (1969),is well known to rhetorical critics: it articulates amethodological process for the understanding ofsocial/political movements based upon dramatisticpresumptions concerning symbolic action andsocial enactments. In “Reading History withKenneth Burke” (1982), Frank Lentricchia arguesthat although dramatism “is Burke’s official pro-gram,” his “more fundamental” activity embodies“a process of formulating, exploring, and makingforays—in so many words, the various acts ofreading and writing history” (222). Drawing pri-marily on Burke’s earlier works (ending with AGrammar, 1945), Lentricchia reads Burke as aMarx-friendly reader of history adept at unpack-ing ideological baggage burdening various philo-sophical histories as well as histories of philosophy.Burke, he concludes, “set standards for the ideo-logical role of intellectuals that contemporary criti-cal theory would do well to measure itself by” (241).


continued

The penultimate essay in Landmark Essaysis, appropriately enough, a perspective on per-spectives. In “Kenneth Burke’s Comedy: TheMultiplication of Perspectives” (1979), WayneBooth interprets Burke as “one of the greatpluralizing minds of our time” (249), placinghim in relation to another prominent pluralist,R. S. Crane. Booth finds in Burke’s comicperspective a “pluralism [that] can embrace allmeanings, potentially, and still repudiate relati-vism of the kind that threatens critical under-standing” (267). Determinate meaning and finaltelos are unattainable: a comic perspective is anongoing hermeneutical dance which works “tocure mankind by keeping things off balance, bydissolving fixities, by turning the potential tra-gedy of fanatical annihilation into the comedyof muddled mutual accomodation” (257). Manycritics, of course, will recall Burke’s response toBooth’s earlier articulation of this interpretation(See Booth, “Kenneth Burke’s Way of Knowing,”

Critical Inquiry, 1 [September 1974], 1-22, andalso Burke, “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes,”pages 23-31 of the same issue).

Without nostalgic tears in her eyes, CelesteMichelle Condit (1992) suggests in the volume’sclosing essay that Burke’s critical orientation(his “agency”) was necessarily at least in part afunction of the social, political, and cultural“scene” at the time of its production; changes inthe “scene” since the 1920s through 1960s oreven 1970s (the time frame of most of Burke’scorpus) should require adjustments in the agencyof critical orientation to the new scene. Thus, in“Post-Burke: Transcending the Substance ofDramatism,” Condit attempts “modifying exten-sions of Burke’s dramatism” in relation to threedynamic contexts: “gender, culture, and class”(273). By adapting and expanding Burke’sdefinition of human, Condit advocates a “post-Burkean” orientation adapted for the exigenciesof a multiculturally exploding world.

These thirteen essays offer a diversity ofinterpretations and adaptations of Burke’s work.Yet by its very nature as a selection of criticalessays on Burke, the volume makes choices ofthose essays worthy of inclusion and those not.By and large, Brummett announces the parametersfor consideration of essays for inclusion forth-rightly: all of the essays are “exclusively theo-retical” (“critical, analytical essays” “constitute apool of works for a potential volume of theirown”); all are, at least in the editor’s evaluationof them, “extraordinary and noteworthy”; takentogether, they reflect “a wide range of academicdisciplines that are now involved in Burkeanstudies,” including “Communication, English,

Sociology, and the eclectic mix of CulturalStudies” (xvi, xvii), and—according to the statedobjectives of Hermagoras Press’ overall Land-mark Essays series—they should be essays ofwhich it is difficult to obtain individual copies.

Given that any such volume of selectedessays must have limits (one cannot, after all,include everything), these are not unreasonablelimits. One may question the value of a collec-tion of “exclusively theoretical” essays (asidefrom perhaps a very few graduate-level seminars,


I personally wonder whether this “exclusivelytheoretical” slant fits well with most classroomneeds); or, one may desire more historical oreven biographical contextualization of Burke’sideas. Or one may accept neither Brummet’sdescription of the Condit and Lentricchia essaysas “on the cutting edge of Burkean scholarship”(xvi) nor his seemingly offhand characterizationof Lentricchia as a “prominent postmodernscholar” who presumably represents that orienta-tion in his writing; in doing so, one is left pon-dering the glaring absence of any essay whichexamines Burke in relation to contemporaryphilosophies of post-modernity or even, by andlarge, post-structuralism.

as a secondary text for a course in Burkeanstudies which wishes to preserve an historicallyimbued perspective on the interpretations andinfluence of Burke in a wide, although stilltruncated, domain of disciplinary interests.

On the other hand, while Landmark Essayson Kenneth Burke, may function well as asupplement to Rueckert’s Critical Responses, itcannot supplant that important anthology. Indeed,given that these seem to be the only two volumesat the present time attempting to offer some sortof diachronic anthology of the interpretationsand influence of Burke, it is important to con-sider the relationship between the two. Of thethirteen essays reprinted in the Landmark Essaysvolume, eight were originally published afterRueckert’s 1969 anthology (three of the otherfive are also reprinted in Critical Responses.One of the two “new reprints” in LandmarkEssays is, ironically, Rueckert’s own 1963 essay,“Toward a Better Life Through Symbolic Action”;

the other is Duncan’s. Oddly, the LandmarkEssays volume does not indicate to the reader inits citations for the other three of the five pre-1969essays that they are also reprinted in CriticalResponses). My point here is that, in terms ofpre-1969 “landmark essays” on Kenneth Burke,the Landmark Essays volume offers little that isnot already available in Critical Responses,especially since that volume also includes twoother of Rueckert’s essays as well as three ofDuncan’s. Given the limited availability ofCritical Responses, Landmark Essays on KennethBurke does make these five essays more acces-sible—and increased accessibilty and usabiltyfor classroom purposes is one of the stated goalsof the entire Landmark Essays series—but itshould also be noted that, with or without accessto Rueckert’s reprint of three of them, none areparticularly obscure or difficult to obtain in theiroriginal publication. Indeed, ironically, the mostobscure of the five essays is probably Griffin’s,

Landmark Essays,

Overall, I have mixed reactions to the volume.On the one hand, there are not many “antholo-gies” of theoretical and/or critical responses toBurke’s work; indeed the only other one attempt-ing to present essays on and responses to Burkewith not only some chronological depth but alsosome diachronic richness which comes to mindis Rueckert’s Critical Responses to KennethBurke, 1924-1966, published in 1969 (Univer-sity of Minnesota Press). The other volumes ofessays on Burke with which I am familiar allfeature essays of more-or-less synchronous—andalso more-or-less contemporary—origin; inaddition, albeit in varying degrees, these volumesalso tend to “speak” a bit more closely in theirrespective disciplinary “voices.” The LandmarkEssays volume is thus potentially most valuable

Review: Landmark Essays


one of the few essays originally published—andhere-to-for only available—in Critical Essays.

In terms of “early” interpretations of Burke,then, the Landmark Essays volume adds little towhat is already anthologized, and in terms ofgenuine “cutting edge” work on Burke the volumehas clear gaps and limits.

Brummett’s framing of the essays in his “Intro-duction” accentuates some of these limitations.In addition to offering Lentricchia as a represen-tative of post-modernism (and Booth as advocat-ing the comic perspective as equipment for livingin “the postmodern condition,” xix), Brummettwaffles on the “totalizability” of Burke’s diverseworks. Although on the one hand he explicitlyacknowledges that “Burke cannot be systematizedtidily,” indeed his “work is probably not totallysystematizable” (xv), on the other he writes attimes of the “Burkean system” (xi), of “Burke’ssystem” (xii), indeed, of “Burke’s system ofthought,” for which “dramatism” may be taken

cal mode of inquiry, not a “substantial” onedesigned to discern what human motives “reallyare.” In addition, Burke presents logology as ex-plicitly analogical (hence the various “analogies”in “On words and The Word”); why confuse theissue further? Brummett’s introduction offersthe reader “instructions” for reading the “map”of landmarks contained in the volume, but not allBurkeans will agree with the instructions.

Just as an anthology must have limits definedby its exclusions, so too does it construct a “canon”—or perhaps in this case, a “theoretical narrative”—defined by its inclusions. Landmark Essays onKenneth Burke charts a path for its reader throughthe wilderness of Burke works and Burkeanscholarship. It is not a bad path, but it is a path,and by taking this path—and this path only—thereader may miss a lot of interesting and inspiringparts of the Burkean wilderness. In other words,one risks missing the forest for the path. #

continuedas a “summarizing term” (xiii). It seems to thisreader questionable whether Burke’s works maybe fairly “summarized” as (reduced to?) “drama-tism”—what, for instance, of “logology,” whichreceives no attention in the introduction and littleenough in the volume itself? In addition, it seemsparticularly suspect given Brummett’s briefdescription of “dramatism” itself.

Brummett emphasizes that drama is not onlya “good metaphor for what Burke wants to sayabout language,” but also a “metaphor [which] isespecially useful in describing human relations.”Although drama has become a “commonplacemetaphor”—after all, “Burke is far from the firstto observe that ‘all the world’s a stage,’ nor toturn that metaphor into systematic thought”—itis nonetheless “a central metaphor for Burke”(xiii, xiv). This intrepretation of dramatism asmetaphorical—in addition to flying in the face ofBurke’s own repeated insistence that dramatismis meant literally—makes dramatism an analogi-

Additions to Secondary Bibliography: ArticlesAppel, E. C. “The Tragic-Symbol Preaching of the

Rev. Wallace E. Fisher.” Journal of Commu-nication and Religion, 10 (1987), 34-43.

Appel, E. C. “Implication and Importance of theNegative in Burke's Dramatistic Philosophy ofLanguage.” Communication Quartery, 41(Winter 1993), 51-65.

Appel, E. C. “Kenneth Burke: Coy Theologian.”Journal of Communication and Religion, 16(1993), 99-110.

Feehan, Michael. “Chinese Finger-Traps or ‘A Per-turbation in the Reality Field’: Paradox as Con-version in Philip K. Dick's Fiction.” In PhilipK. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpreta-tions, ed. Samuel J. Umland, pp. 199-206.Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Feehan, Michael. “Kenneth Burke’s Contributionto a Theory of Language.” Semiotica, 76.3/4(1989), 245-66.

Bibliographic Additions, continued on page 24


Will WrightWild Knowledge:Science, Language, and Social Lifein a Fragile EnvironmentMinneapolis:University of Minnesota, 1992pp. xiv + 236.paper $15.95

James R. PickettMonmouth College

Stephen BygraveKenneth Burke:Rhetoric and Ideology,London: Routledge, 1993pp. xxii + 123cloth $55.00paper $19.95

Thomas CarmichaelUniversity of Western Ontario


IdeologyEcology &

W ill Wright’s Wild Knowledge arrives at a precipitous moment, with increasing

interest in the rhetorical analysis of science andecology. Such criticism, and this particulareffort, owes much to the work of KennethBurke. Wright begins with a dialectical spin,that scientific knowledge organizes and legiti-mates a social-natural interaction and that suchknowledge must recognize its own social-natural dimension. By raising this point,Wright aspires to bring scientific knowledgeinto an ecological coherence that, he claims,science lacks. Such coherence, Wright argues,will be found in an ecologically sustainablenotion of rationality. This concept of rationalityis to be found in narratives, because such storiesrefer to human agents and therefore point to the“sustainability” of such life. In other words,

when the “story” stops, we stop.Wright’s deployment of Burkean “capital”

occurs late in his narrative. To get to this point,Wright retells the now familiar tale of the philo-sophy of science: how Kuhn, Rorty, et al. under-mined the received view. Next, Wright recoversthe relationship between physics and politics inthe seventeenth century, as well as a summaryof the history of mathematics. He concludesthat the ideas of physics were formed by politicsas much as by observation, and that mathematicsmade physics’ ideas about nature both plausibleand rational.

Next, Wright moves the plot from the sceneof science to that of social science. First, hewishes us to make an epistemic move, from“knowing individuals” to language-using minds.

Ecology, continued on page 18

now as an anticipation of many of the problemsapparently “discovered” and only recentlyaddressed in contemporary critical theory andcultural studies.

Bygrave’s discussion is also designed tointroduce or perhaps to reintroduce Burke’swork in the U.K., where, as Bygrave claims,“Burke has hardly been read at all” (8).Bygrave’s careful positioning of himself as anoutsider with respect to the specifically Ameri-can intellectual tradition is often useful, as whenhe debunks Angus Fletcher’s crude characteriza-tion of the essentially American nature ofBurke’s project, but Bygrave’s overall account isfinally very much the mainstream of recenttheoretical rereadings of Burke. Bygrave bor-rows from Terry Eagleton in order to define

Ideology, continued on page 19

S tephen Bygrave’s Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology is a volume in the Routledge

series, “Critics of the Twentieth Century.” Underthe general editorship of Christopher Norris, thisseries seeks, in Norris’ own words, “not only toexpound what is of lasting significance but alsoto set these critics in the context of present-dayargument and debate” (viii). Stephen Bygrave’sdiscussion of the Burkean corpus endeavors tofulfil this twofold aspiration by situating Burke“as a historical critic who exemplifies a road nottaken for ideological critique” (16). Bygrave’sBurke is both eccentric and proleptic; outside themainstream of Left literary critique and seem-ingly impossible to imitate, Burke’s work, inBygrave’s reading, is at the same time the mostfar-reaching and rigorous of modern efforts toconstruct a contextualized criticism, and stands


Ecology, continued from page 17Such minds are social, insofar as it is languagethat constitutes the possibility of social life “andtherefore individuals.” Second, he wants socialtheory to stop referring, in the last instance, to anature it has never known, but instead to language.

It is in terms of this reference to languagethat Burke finally appears. For Wright, languageis the defining characteristic of human beingsand makes possible human action in the world.From Burke, Wright hopes to build a linguistictheory of social life.

Such a dream is not unique to Wright, who isan adept reader of Burke. He understands theinterplay between symbols that divide us (mys-tery) and the symbols that unite us (identifica-tion), and that this has ontological status forBurke. Wright clearly understands that theordering of differences through identificationleads inevitably to hierarchy. Through thisreading, Wright concludes that Burke developed

a formal theory of language in which the goal oflanguage is to sustain itself.

An equally adept reader of this review mayhave noticed that Wright dropped his “social-natural” dialectic along the way. Like manyreaders of Burke, Wright seems to have forgot-ten that Burke places equal emphasis upon both“symbol-using” and “animal,” a reason thatBurke revised his definition to “bodies that learnlanguage.” In short, while we might stop whenthe “story” stops, the non-verbal motion ofnature might keep rolling along. Sustainabilityis what some “deep” ecologists term ananthropocentric standard.

As an anthropoid, I have no objections tosuch a standard. As a rhetorician, I believesustainability to be a worthy topoi. As a symbol-using animal, I wish more readers of Burkewould pay attention to that dialectic, and toBurke’s plea that we attend to motives fromboth ends. #

Ecology &


conflict or division, so that contextualizationand the limits of contextualization are the truesubject of Burke’s vast rhetorical project.

Although this book presents us with a ver-sion of Burke that has been with us for sometime, at least in North America, Bygrave’sdiscussion does provide a valuable summaryof that position and of its implications. Thisbook is not intended to be comprehensive, and,although it gestures toward a contextualizationof Burke’s own connection with respect to Leftcritique in the American tradition, it is not aclose historical account of Burke’s position.Neither is this book strictly an introduction,demanding from the reader, as it does, a fairlycomprehensive and agile familiarity with themajor Burke texts. But Bygrave’s volume doesfulfil the aims of the series to which it belongsin its insistence upon the ongoing importanceof ideological critique as the persuasive engineof cultural criticism in the very widest sense.#

Ideology, continued from page 17the task of rhetorical analysis as the uncoveringof ideology; it is this task that he regards as thefundamental project of Burke’s critical theory andpractice, a project that embraces interpretation inthe widest sense, and which “depends upon (andilluminates) a concept of ideology even where theterm is absent” (17). As his references to Eagle-ton might lead one to expect, Bygrave’s Burke re-sembles in large part the Burke who comes to usfrom Jameson and Lentricchia. Bygrave carefullysuggests the ways in which his own reading differsfrom those presented by Jameson and Lentricchia,but his discussion never really pursues thosedifferences. In his assertion that Burke dependsupon an unproblematic notion of the subject, forexample, Bygrave’s own reservations sound verymuch like Jameson’s insistence that Burke lacksan adequate place for the unconscious, and, in asimilar vein, Bygrave’s refusal to read Burke as aheroic Gramscian figure, as he claims Lentricchia

does, is belied at the end of his text when he ar-gues that Burke is most exemplary not as a readerof literary texts, but “as a reader of proverbs, ofconstitutions, of the narrative of ‘history’ itself”(110). One might suggest that the ability to ex-tract the narrative of history from the cameraobscura of lived experience is at the very leastclose to a heroic Gramscian intellectual enterprise.

But these quibbles should not overshadowthe cogency and range of Bygrave’s account.Bygrave’s discussion is organized into fourseparate investigations into parallel problematicsin Burke’s work. Put briefly, these problematicsarise out of the tension between contextualizationand essentialization, language and action, wordsand the world. Bygrave’s book addresses theseproblematics in their various manifestations: inthe transition from A Grammar to A Rhetoric; inthe connection of historicism to logology; in thealignment of perspective by incongruity with thecomic frame; and in the dialectic of essences and

constitutions. Each of these topics takes up asingle chapter, and in each discussion, Bygravecomes to assert, as he announces in the introduc-tion: “that the ‘grounds’ of any interpretative actthemselves rest on an act. This implies neithercircularity nor an infinite regress. Burke antici-pates this deconstructive move, and the move be-yond it too” (17). Bygrave’s favorite represen-tative anecdote from Burke is the often quoteddescription of the parlor conversation from ThePhilosophy of Literary Form; with respect toBygrave’s own analysis, the corresponding repre-sentative moment might be found in his discus-sion of Burke’s musings on ideology in the“Definition of Man” essay in Language as SymbolicAction. In Bygrave’s reading, this is Burke’spractising ideological critique at its best, positingideology as “something like the ‘ground’ of allargument” (51). For Bygrave, every Burkeanmusing on questions of origins, horizons, andgod-terms is also a bringing to light of a prior

Ideology, continued


Jack SeltzerPennsylvaniaState Universityy

K enneth Burke died having left behind him plenty of reading for Burke scholars

—that’s an understatement. But I neverthelesswant to call attention to an interesting earlyitem by Burke (from 1928) because it isn’tincluded in any of the Burke bibliographies.

It is pretty well known that early in 1925Burke and some of his friends—MalcolmCowley, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate,Slater Brown, Hart Crane, Charles Sheeler,Harold Loeb, Isador Schneider, PeggyCowley, Sue Jenkins, and Matthew Josephson,among others—put together a literary spoof,Aesthete:1925, a 32-page monograph full ofmock criticism, fiction, poetry, and advertisingthat was intended as a stinging riposte toErnest Boyd’s “Aesthete: Model 1924.”Boyd’s essay, published in H. L. Mencken’snew American Mercury, was a fairly tamecomposite portrait of a young aesthete thatsatirized second-generation Greenwich Village

An Amusing Addition to themodernists like Burke, John Dos Passos, E. E.Cummings, Gorham Munson, and others—and that a thin-skinned Malcolm Cowley tookas a personal attack. Under the leadership ofCowley, Aesthete:1925 was accordingly de-vised as a Dadaesque “significant gesture” inorder to ridicule Boyd and his “older gene-ration” of American critics and poets:Mencken, Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt,Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, Van WyckBrooks, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, CarlSandburg, and so forth. Among other things,the volume included Sheeler’s pen-and-inkcover; an overview by the fictitious editor,one “Walter S. Hankel of St. Louis”; “LittleMoments with Great Critics”; a piece of mockexperimental fiction by Brown; “News Clips”ridiculing Rosenfeld, Mencken, and Boyd;poetry purportedly by “Walter S. Hankel”;Burke’s “Dada, Dead or Alive” (a fairly seri-ous meditation on American Dadaism that was


Kenneth Burke Bibliography

the land of their mother/ With their hats in onehand and their palms in another.” “Knightsof Press-Agentry,” by Josephson, mocked thedevelopment of New York ad agencies (andspoke of “television”). An experimental storyby Coates struck at the vapidity of the NewYork commercial scene. Josephson attackedthe consumerism behind Henry Ford’s success.Cowley’s poem “Tar Babies,” complete withexplanatory footnotes, apparently parodiedEliot. And an “Open Letter to Mr. Ezra Poundand the Other Exiles” poked fun at the entireexpatriot movement.

Interspersed with these contents were aseries of mock ads by Burke that are remi-niscent of the one he had written for Aesthete:1925. One, on page 90 (“Cheat the Censor,Take Doctor Rubbm’s Confidential Massage”),offers a mock testimonial by one GuyHornsby, a “novelist formerly of the WaldoFrank school” who rid himself of Waldo-esque

directed at Frank); and a mock ad by Burkethat urged readers to “Menckenize!” by join-ing the “Mencken Promotion Society.”

What has not been noticed is that Burkewas also involved in a similar mockery of theolder generation a few years later. In Januaryof 1928 (Shi 115-16), Brown, Cowley, Burke,Josephson, and Robert Coates contributed atwenty-page spoof of New York society to thethirteenth number of transition (summer 1928,pages 83-102), an avant-garde modernistmagazine that Eugene Jolas published fromexpatriot Paris and other European venuesfrom 1927 to 1938, that billed itself, with jus-tice, as “An International Quarterly for Cre-ative Experiment,” and that carried (to thetune of several hundred pages per month orper quarter) expressionist, dadaist, surrealist,and other innovative work by Crane, Williams,Tate, Gertrude Stein, Kay Boyle, ArchibaldMacleish, Yvor Winters, Harry Crosby, and

other Americans, as well as Irish, English,Russian, and Spanish moderns. It was in tran-sition that James Joyce published his “Work inProgress” (now known as Finnegans Wake)—appropriately so, since Jolas was especially in-terested in experiments in language and effortsto build a new philosophy from the materialsof the New Psychology of Freud and Jung.

“New York: 1928” consists of a set of vari-ous materials, mostly inside jokes, that weredesigned to ridicule in a gentle, even sopho-moric way, modernist excesses of one kind oranother as well as “the insipidity of Americanculture in an age of mass production and con-sumerism” (Bak 402). A Cowley dadaesqueprose poem/manifesto satirized the crushing ofcivil liberties by the economic prosperities ofthe 1920s. Seven brief poems presumably by“Walter S. Hankel” made fun of Ezra Pound,Williams’s friend Robert McAlmon, the firesidepoets, and certain expatriots who “oft return to

“violence, ruttings, and phallic symbols” bysubjecting himself to a program of massagesby Doctor Rubbm. A second, on page 94(“She Bought the Wrong Book!”), ridiculesthe Book of the Month Club by touting adoubtful Book of the Year Association that canalways “select for you the correct volume, thebook that your neighbor will be talkingabout,” so that you can avoid the embarrass-ment of discussing “the wrong book” in frontof the boss. A third (“Important Communi-cation to the Editor”), signed by “H. L.Mannikin,” is a another parody of Mencken’sself-promotional efforts. All three ads arenamed as products of the “Prince Llan [Ad]Agency”—a nomenclature that identifies themwith Burke, the author of the short story“Prince Llan” whose publication marked thedemise of the avant garde periodical Broomearly in 1924. Since Burke is named as acontributor on page 83, since the performance


is directed against standardization, commer-cialism, materialism (frequent targets of Burke’swit and wisdom), and since he had contributedsimilar mock ads to Aesthete; 1925 it seemsundeniable that Burke was the author of thesethree contributions to “New York: 1928.”

The 1925 and 1928 capers were not the onlyspoofs Burke was involved in during the 1920s,of course. Besides the Aesthete, 1925 episode,Burke had taken part in a poetry scam in 1918during which he, Cowley, Berenice Abbott, andFoster Damon invented an imaginary rustic poet,Earl Roppel (“the plowboy poet of Tioga County”)and succeeded in getting older-generationmoderns Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, and Con-rad Aiken to take him seriously (Bak 115-20).In 1921 and 1922 he started writing a play withCowley (apparently it has not survived) that wasdesigned to ridicule Floyd Dell’s fervor forFreudianism, perhaps in the tradition of SusanGlaspell’s spoof Suppressed Desires (1915).

An Amusing Additionto the Burke Bibliography

And he resurrected “Walter S. Hankle” againwith his friends in a 1930 contri-bution calledWhither, Whither, or After Sex, What? ASymposium to End Symposiums (New York:Macauley), a book that I have been unable toexamine personally; according to Armin PaulFrank and Mechthild Frank’s bibliography, itincluded Burke’s satire of capitalism “Waste—The Future of Prosperity” which also appearedin The New Republic and in Reader’s Digest.

Those who knew Burke personally remarkunfailingly on Burke’s wit and affability andirreverence, and all these spoofs, including therather light-hearted one known as “New York:1928,” point to the presence of a man who tookhis work and the work of his colleagues veryseriously—but never too seriously.

Secondary Works CitedBak, Hans. Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years.

Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Cowley, Malcolm. Exile’s Return. New York:Norton, 1934.

Frank, Armin, and Mechthild Frank. “TheWritings of Kenneth Burke.” In WilliamRueckert, ed., Critical Responses to KennethBurke. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1969. 495-512.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, andCarolyn Ulrich. The Little Magazine: AHistory and a Bibliography. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1946.

Josephson, Matthew. Life among the Surrealists.New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1962.

Loeb, Harold. The Way It Was. New York:Criterion Books, 1959.

Shi, David E. Matthew Josephson, BourgeoisBohemian. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1981.

Tashjian, Dickran. Skyscraper Primitives:Dada and the American Avant-Garde

1910-1925. Middletown, CT: WesleyanUniversity Press, 1975.

Notes1. The episode is recounted briefly in Bak

(323-28; 294-95), Josephson (268-69),Tashjian (139-42), Loeb (241-42), andCowley (198-99). For a full rendering ofthe details, see my forthcoming Conversingwith the Moderns: Kenneth Burke, 1915-1931.

2. On transition, see Hoffman et al, 172-80.3. Since the Book of the Month Club was

founded in 1926, Burke’s satire was quitetopical.

4. “Walter S. Hankle” also made an appearanceas one subject of a Cowley “anthology” ofportrait poems on his friends—among themBurke, Coates, Josephson, and Crane—thatappeared in volume 12 of the Little Review(Spring/Summer, 1926, 33-36).


Jeffrey L. CourtrightMiami University, Ohio

The Huntfor Kenneth Burke’s “French” Article

O ne of the many Burke articles I read during my doctoral program at Purdue was his

“Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education.”At the end of the article appears a two-pagecurriculum vitae explaining its place in KB’sthinking. Among the “Boik Woiks” listed was acurious “Miscellaneous item,” a reference to anarticle on “the motives in the ‘higher standard ofliving,’” entitled “Nous autres matérialistes”(literally, “We Other Materialists”) and pub-lished in the French journal Esprit in November1946. Since I was looking for a “NeglectedEssay” to share at the 1990 Burke Conference inNew Harmony and I found no citation for theFrench title in any Burkean indexes, I had a mys-tery on my hands. I couldn’t imagine an articlethat Burke had failed to publish in English.

My initial research located not only a copy ofthe French article but a bit of history surroundingits publication. The article can be found on pages628-42 in volume 14 (new series) of Esprit.

According to letters he wrote 11 Sept 1946 toMaxim Lieber and 11 Oct 1946 to J. SibleyWatson, Burke had completed an essay entitled“The American Way,” but had not found adomestic venue for its publication. (The letterscan be found among Burke's papers in the PatteeLibrary at Penn State.) In the meantime, themanuscript was sent to France, was translated byAlex Wittemberg, and went to press in French.

A few years after the New Harmony confer-ence I was perusing (for a different project) thebibliography in Rueckert’s Critical Responses toKenneth Burke and discovered the English ver-sion of the article. It is not listed under “Part 4.Essays” where I had looked originally for theFrench title but appears under “Part 7. Commen-tary, Discussions, and Miscellaneous.” Burkepublished “The American Way” in the firstvolume of Touchstone, December 1947, pp. 3-9,a year after its French counterpart.

Mystery solved.


Founded in 1878 by the priests and brothers of the HolyGhost, Duquesne University carries a more than century-old tradition of providing a unique liberal and profes-sional education with an emphasis on moral values, adedication to quality teaching and a commitment to ser-vice. Today Duquesne University serves more than 9500undergraduate and graduate students, offering more than150 programs on the bachelor’s, master’s and doctorallevels in its nine schools: the McAnulty College andGraduate School of Liberal Arts and the schools of Busi-ness Administration, Education, Health Sciences, Law,Music, Natural and Environmental Sciences, Nursing, andPharmacy.

The Department of Communication at Duquesne of-fers bachelor’s degrees in either Communication Stud-ies, Journalism, or Media Studies and master’s degreesin either Rhetoric & the Philosophy of Communication,Corporate Communication, or Online Journalism.

The Kenneth Burke Society is a nonprofit organizationincorporated in the State of New York since 1988. An-nual dues of $20 for faculty and $10 for students entitlemembers to a year's subscription of the Kenneth BurkeSociety Newsletter (see insert). The Newsletter is pub-lished semi-annually under the Society's auspices andproduced in Duquesne University’s Department of Com-munication, Pittsburgh, PA 15282 (phone 412-396-6446;fax 412-396-4792). Readers are encouraged to “jointhe fray” by submitting letters, abstracts, or manuscriptsthat promote the study, understanding, dissemination, re-search, critical analysis, and preservation of works byand about Kenneth Burke. Authors should prepare manu-scripts following MLA or APA guidelines and submitboth a paper copy and a 3.5 inch disk file using any es-tablished Macintosh, MS-DOS, or Windowswordprocessor. Shorter pieces can be attached to an e-mail ([email protected]. duq.edu).

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KBS News and Announcements

Julie Whitaker is working on an edition of KB’sunpublished poems. She would appreciate re-ceiving any information about his poetry or anyarticles or reviews which relate to it. ContactJulie Whitaker, 361 West 36th Street, New York,New York 10018.

§The film on KB that Harry Chapin had been pro-ducing before his death has been completed un-der the supervision of Chapin’s wife. Transferredto a 15 minute videotape, it is now available fromthe Burke Society for $50. All profits go to theSociety. Contact Star Muir.

The recent obituary and memorial issues of theKBS Newsletter are available for $4; a xeroxedpacket of back issues is available for $12. ContactStar Muir.

§The Society is in the process of compiling anupdated history which will identify early stagesin the formation of the Society, summarize thethemes and seminar reports from each of thetriennial conferences, and give background in-formation on the nature and function of the So-ciety. Paid members will be entitled to a forth-coming Directory as well as the Newsletter.

Bibliographic Additionscontinued from page 15Feehan, Michael. “Multiple Editorial Horizons

of Leaves of Grass.” Resources for AmericanLiterary Study, 20.2 (1994), 213-230.

books & bibliography - kenneth · pdf filetwo on counter-statement (cs). then, ... to...

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