Kenneth Burke
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Kenneth Burke (May 5, 1897–November 19, 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.
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[edit] Early life
He was born on May 5 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 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. In Greenwich Village he kept company with avant-garde writers such as Hart Crane, Cowley, Gorham Munson, and later Allen Tate.
[edit] Influences
Burke, like many twentieth century theorists and critics, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He 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.
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] Philosophy
Burke defined the rhetorical function of language as "the use 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.
[edit] Later Works
He also wrote a novel, Towards a Better Life, and the song "One Light in a Dark Valley" (later recorded by his grandson Harry Chapin).[1]
Although his scholarly work has inspired many academics, his early personal history reflects a slightly different image. After dropping out of college, he spent much of twenties working as a critic, as a researcher for the Bureau of Social Hygiene, and as an editor for The Dial. He also ghostwrote the book Dangerous Drugs for Colonel Arthur Woods.
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.
[edit] Principal Works
- Counter-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)
