Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory.[1] As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one of the first individuals to stray from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as "symbolic action."
For the Irish hurler, see Kenneth Burke (hurler).
Kenneth Burke
Burke was unorthodox, concerning himself not only with literary texts, but also with the elements of the text that interacted with the audience: social, historical, political background, author biography, etc.[2]
For his career, Burke has been praised by The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism as "one of the most unorthodox, challenging, theoretically sophisticated American-born literary critics of the twentieth century." His work continues to be discussed by rhetoricians and philosophers.[3]
Personal history[edit]
Kenneth Duva Burke was born on May 5, 1897 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Peabody High School, where he befriended classmates Malcolm Cowley and James Light.[4] He attended Ohio State University to pursue courses in French, German, Greek, and Latin. He moved with his parents to Weehawken, New Jersey and later he enrolled at Columbia University.[5] During his time there, he was a member of the Boar's Head Society.[6] The constraining learning environment, however, impelled Burke to leave Columbia, never receiving a college diploma.[7] In Greenwich Village, he kept company with avant-garde writers such as Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, Gorham Munson, and later Allen Tate.[8] Raised by a Christian Science mother, Burke later became an avowed agnostic.
In 1919, he married Lily Mary Batterham, with whom he had three daughters: the late feminist, Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987); musician (Jeanne) Elspeth Chapin Hart (1920-2015); and writer and poet France Burke (born c. 1925). He later divorced Lily and, in 1933, married her sister Elizabeth Batterham, with whom he had 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 to 1929. Kenneth himself was an avid player of the piano. He received the Dial Award in 1928 for distinguished service to American literature. He was the music critic of The Nation from 1934 to 1936, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935.[9]
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 Burke's personal papers and correspondence are housed at Pennsylvania State University's Special Collections Library. However, despite his stint lecturing at universities, Burke was an autodidact and a self-taught scholar.[10]
In later life, his New Jersey farm was a popular summer retreat for his extended family, as reported by his grandson Harry Chapin, a popular singer-songwriter. Burke died of heart failure at his home in Andover, New Jersey, age 96.[11]
In "Definition of Man", the first essay of his collection Language as Symbolic Action (1966), Burke defined humankind as a "symbol using animal" (p. 3). This definition of man, he argued, means that "reality" has actually "been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems" (p. 5). Without our encyclopedias, atlases, and other assorted reference guides, we would know little about the world that lies beyond our immediate sensory 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.
Burke's poetry (which has drawn little critical attention and seldom been anthologized) appears in three collections: Book of Moments (1955), Collected Poems 1915–1967 (1968), and the posthumously published Late Poems: 1968-1993 Attitudinizings Verse-wise, While Fending for One's Selph, and in a Style Somewhat Artificially Colloquial (2005). His fiction is collected in Here & Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke (2005).
His other principal works are
He also wrote the song "One Light in a Dark Valley," later recorded by his grandson Harry Chapin.[3]
Burke's most notable correspondence is collected here:
Honors[edit]
Burke was awarded the National Medal for Literature at the American Book Awards in 1981. According to The New York Times, April 20, 1981, "The $15,000 award, endowed in memory of the late Harold Guinzberg, founder of the Viking Press, honors a living American writer 'for a distinguished and continuing contribution to American letters.'"
