|
Showing 1 - 25 of
25 matches in All Departments
This edition collects the bulk of Burke's literary reviews--many of
them reprinted here for the first time--and positions them as
scholarship in their own right. In more than 150 reviews, he
explores poetic, fictional, and critical works to discern the
nature of aesthetics, rhetoric, communication, literary theory,
sociology, and literature as equipment for living.
In August, 1959, an anxious William Rueckert wrote Kenneth Burke to
ask, "When on earth is that perpetually 'forthcoming' A Symbolic of
Motives forthcoming? Will it be soon enough so that I can wait for
it before I complete my book Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human
Relations]? If the Symbolic is not forthcoming soon, would it be
too much trouble for you to send me a list of exactly what will be
included in the book, and some idea of the structure of the book?"
Burke replied, "Holla If you're uncomfortable, think how
uncomfortable I am. But I'll do the best I can. . . ." In the
course of their long correspondence, the nature of the
Symbolic-Burke's much-anticipated third volume in his Motivorum
trilogy-vexed both men, and they discussed its contents often.
Ultimately, Burke left the job of pulling it all together to
Rueckert. Forty-eight years after they first discussed the
Symbolic, Rueckert has fulfilled his end of the bargain with this
book, Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955. ESSAYS TOWARD
A SYMBOLIC OF MOTIVES, 1950--1955 contains the work Burke planned
to include in the third book in his Motivorum trilogy, which began
with A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950).
In these essays-some of which appear here in print for the first
time-Burke offers his most precise and elaborated account of his
dramatistic poetics, providing readers with representative analyses
of such writers as Aeschylus, Goethe, Hawthorne, Roethke,
Shakespeare, and Whitman. Following Rueckert's Introduction, Burke
lays out his approach in essays that theorize and illustrate the
method, which he considered essential for understanding language as
symbolic action and human relations generally. Burke concludes with
a focused account of humans as symbol-using and misusing animals
and then offers his tour de force reading of Goethe's Faust. About
the Author KENNETH BURKE (1897-1993) is the author of many books,
including the landmark predecessors in the Motivorum trilogy: A
Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). He has
been hailed as one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth
century and possibly the greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Paul
Jay refers to him as "the most theoretically challenging,
unorthodox, and sophisticated of twentieth-century speculators on
literature and culture." Geoffrey Hartman praises him as "the wild
man of American criticism." According to Scott McLemee, Burke may
have "accidentally create d] cultural studies." About the Editor
William H. Rueckert, the "Dean of Burke Studies," has authored or
edited numerous groundbreaking books and articles on Kenneth Burke,
including the landmark study, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human
Relations (1963, 1982). His correspondence with Burke was collected
in Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959-1987
(Parlor, 2003). His most recent book is Faulkner From
Within-Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William
Faulkner (Parlor, 2004).
This volume gathers and annotates all of the Shakespeare criticism,
including previously unpublished lectures and notes, by the
maverick American intellectual Kenneth Burke. Burke's
interpretations of Shakespeare have influenced important lines of
contemporary scholarship; playwrights and directors have been
stirred by his dramaturgical investigations; and many readers
outside academia have enjoyed his ingenious dissections of what
makes a play function. Burke's intellectual project continually
engaged with Shakespeare's works, and Burke's writings on
Shakespeare, in turn, have had an immense impact on generations of
readers. Carefully edited and annotated, with helpful
cross-references, Burke's fascinating interpretations of
Shakespeare remain challenging, provocative, and accessible. Read
together, these pieces form an evolving argument about the nature
of Shakespeare's artistry. Included are thirteen analyses of
individual plays and poems, an introductory lecture explaining his
approach to reading Shakespeare, and a comprehensive appendix of
scores of Burke's other references to Shakespeare. The editor,
Scott L. Newstok, also provides a historical introduction and an
account of Burke's legacy. This edition fulfils Burke's own vision
of collecting in one volume his Shakespeare criticism, portions of
which had appeared in the many books he had published throughout
his lengthy career. Here, Burke examines Hamlet, Twelfth Night,
Julius Caesar, Venus and Adonis, Othello, Timon of Athens, Antony
and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, A
Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The
Tempest, Falstaff, the Sonnets, and Shakespeare's imagery. KENNETH
BURKE (1897-1993) was the author of many books, including the
landmark Motivorum trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric
of Motives (1950), and Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives,
1950-1955 (2007). He has been hailed as one of the most original
American thinkers of the twentieth century and possibly the
greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Burke's enduring familiarity
with Shakespeare helped shape his own theory of dramatism, an
ambitious elaboration of the "all the world's a stage" conceit.
Burke is renowned for his far-reaching 1951 essay on Othello, which
wrestles with concerns still relevant to scholars more than half a
century later; his imaginative ventriloquism of Mark Antony's
address over Caesar's body has likewise found a number of
appreciative readers, as have his many other essays on the
playwright. SCOTT L. NEWSTOK is Assistant Professor of English at
Gustavus Adolphus College and Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow
at Yale University.
|
The War of Words (Paperback)
Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer; Kenneth Burke
|
R736
R633
Discovery Miles 6 330
Save R103 (14%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
When Kenneth Burke conceived his celebrated "Motivorum" project in
the 1940s and 1950s, he envisioned it in three parts. Whereas the
third part, A Symbolic of Motives, was never finished, A Grammar of
Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) have become
canonical theoretical documents. A Rhetoric of Motives was
originally intended to be a two-part book. Here, at last, is the
second volume, the until-now unpublished War of Words, where Burke
brilliantly exposes the rhetorical devices that sponsor war in the
name of peace. Discouraging militarism during the Cold War even as
it catalogues belligerent persuasive strategies and tactics that
remain in use today, The War of Words reveals how popular news
media outlets can, wittingly or not, foment international tensions
and armaments during tumultuous political periods. This
authoritative edition includes an introduction from the editors
explaining the compositional history and cultural contexts of both
The War of Words and A Rhetoric of Motives. The War of Words
illuminates the study of modern rhetoric even as it deepens our
understanding of post-World War II politics.
Kenneth Burke's innovative use of dramatism and dialectical method
have made him a powerful critical force in an extraordinary variety
of disciplines--education, philosophy, history, psychology,
religion, and others. While most widely acclaimed as a literary
critic, Burke has elaborated a perspective toward the study of
behavior and society that holds immense significance and rich
insights for sociologists. This original anthology brings together
for the first time Burke's key writings on symbols and social
relations to offer social scientists access to Burke's thought.
In his superb introductory essay, Joseph R. Gusfield traces the
development of Burke's approach to human action and its
relationship to other similar sources of theory and ideas in
sociology; he discusses both Burke's influence on sociologists and
the limits of his perspective. Burke regards literature as a form
of human behavior--and human behavior as embedded in language. His
lifework represents a profound attempt to understand the
implications for human behavior based on the fact that humans are
"symbol-using animals." As this volume demonstrates, the work that
Burke produced from the 1930s through the 1960s stands as both
precursor and contemporary key to recent intellectual movements
such as structuralism, symbolic anthropology, phenomenological and
interpretive sociology, critical theory, and the renaissance of
symbolic interaction.
As critic, Kenneth Burke's preoccupations were at the beginning
purely aesthetic and literary; but after "Counter-Statement"
(1931), he began to discriminate a 'rhetorical' or persuasive
component in literature, and thereupon became a philosopher of
language and human conduct. In "A Grammar of Motives" (1945) and "A
Rhetoric of Motives" (1950), Burke's conception of 'symbolic
action' comes into its own: all human activities - linguistic or
extra-linguistic - are modes of symbolizing; man is defined as the
symbol-using (and -misusing) animal. The critic's job becomes one
of the interpreting human symbolizing wherever he finds it, with
the aim of illuminating human motivation. Thus the reach of the
literary critic now extends to the social and ethical. "A Grammar
of Motives" is a 'methodical meditation' on such complex linguistic
forms as plays, stories, poems, theologies, metaphysical systems,
political philosophies, and constitutions. "A Rhetoric of Motives"
expands the field to human ways of persuasion and identification.
Persuasion, as Burke sees it, 'ranges from the bluntest quest of
advantage, as in sales promotion or propaganda, through courtship,
social etiquette, education, and the sermon, to a 'pure' form that
delights in the process of appeal for itself alone, without
ulterior purpose. And identification ranges from the politician
who, addressing an audience of farmers, says, 'I was a farm boy
myself,' through the mysteries of social status, to the mystic's
devout identification with the sources of all being.'
Kenneth Burke has been widely praised as one of the sharpest
readers of Shakespeare, Freud, and Marx, among others. He was also
well known for turning his many book reviews into essays and
excursions of his own, in the interest of tracking down the
implications of terminologies and concepts, all the while grappling
with some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. EQUIPMENT
FOR LIVING: THE LITERARY REVIEWS OF KENNETH BURKE collects the bulk
of his literary reviews, many of them reprinted here for the first
time and positioning them as scholarship in their own right. In
over 150 reviews, Burke explores poetic, fictional, and critical
works to discern the nature of aesthetics, rhetoric, communication,
literary theory, sociology, and literature as equipment for living.
Along the way, he encounters some of the finest literary and
critical minds of his day, including writers such as William Carlos
Williams, e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein,
Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Shirley Jackson,
Henry Miller, and Marianne Moore; and critics and philosophers such
as John Dewey, J. L. Austin, Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Wilson, I. A.
Richards, Denis Donoghue, Wayne Booth, Harold Bloom, Van Wyck
Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Alfred North Whitehead. This collection
organizes reviews across the wide range of fields that Burke
engages, including literature, literary criticism, history,
politics, philosophy, sociology, and biography. NATHANIEL A. RIVERS
(PhD, Purdue University) is Assistant Professor of English at
Georgetown University. RYAN P. WEBER, (PhD, Purdue University) is
Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Together,
they received the Emergent Scholar Award from the Kenneth Burke
Society in 2005.
In August, 1959, an anxious William Rueckert wrote Kenneth Burke to
ask, "When on earth is that perpetually 'forthcoming' A Symbolic of
Motives forthcoming? Will it be soon enough so that I can wait for
it before I complete my book Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human
Relations]? If the Symbolic is not forthcoming soon, would it be
too much trouble for you to send me a list of exactly what will be
included in the book, and some idea of the structure of the book?"
Burke replied, "Holla If you're uncomfortable, think how
uncomfortable I am. But I'll do the best I can. . . ." In the
course of their long correspondence, the nature of the
Symbolic-Burke's much-anticipated third volume in his Motivorum
trilogy-vexed both men, and they discussed its contents often.
Ultimately, Burke left the job of pulling it all together to
Rueckert. Forty-eight years after they first discussed the
Symbolic, Rueckert has fulfilled his end of the bargain with this
book, Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955. ESSAYS TOWARD
A SYMBOLIC OF MOTIVES, 1950--1955 contains the work Burke planned
to include in the third book in his Motivorum trilogy, which began
with A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950).
In these essays-some of which appear here in print for the first
time-Burke offers his most precise and elaborated account of his
dramatistic poetics, providing readers with representative analyses
of such writers as Aeschylus, Goethe, Hawthorne, Roethke,
Shakespeare, and Whitman. Following Rueckert's Introduction, Burke
lays out his approach in essays that theorize and illustrate the
method, which he considered essential for understanding language as
symbolic action and human relations generally. Burke concludes with
a focused account of humans as symbol-using and misusing animals
and then offers his tour de force reading of Goethe's Faust. About
the Author KENNETH BURKE (1897-1993) is the author of many books,
including the landmark predecessors in the Motivorum trilogy: A
Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). He has
been hailed as one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth
century and possibly the greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Paul
Jay refers to him as "the most theoretically challenging,
unorthodox, and sophisticated of twentieth-century speculators on
literature and culture." Geoffrey Hartman praises him as "the wild
man of American criticism." According to Scott McLemee, Burke may
have "accidentally create d] cultural studies." About the Editor
William H. Rueckert, the "Dean of Burke Studies," has authored or
edited numerous groundbreaking books and articles on Kenneth Burke,
including the landmark study, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human
Relations (1963, 1982). His correspondence with Burke was collected
in Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959-1987
(Parlor, 2003). His most recent book is Faulkner From
Within-Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William
Faulkner (Parlor, 2004).
This volume gathers and annotates all of the Shakespeare criticism,
including previously unpublished lectures and notes, by the
maverick American intellectual Kenneth Burke. Burke's
interpretations of Shakespeare have influenced important lines of
contemporary scholarship; playwrights and directors have been
stirred by his dramaturgical investigations; and many readers
outside academia have enjoyed his ingenious dissections of what
makes a play function. Burke's intellectual project continually
engaged with Shakespeare's works, and Burke's writings on
Shakespeare, in turn, have had an immense impact on generations of
readers. Carefully edited and annotated, with helpful
cross-references, Burke's fascinating interpretations of
Shakespeare remain challenging, provocative, and accessible. Read
together, these pieces form an evolving argument about the nature
of Shakespeare's artistry. Included are thirteen analyses of
individual plays and poems, an introductory lecture explaining his
approach to reading Shakespeare, and a comprehensive appendix of
scores of Burke's other references to Shakespeare. The editor,
Scott L. Newstok, also provides a historical introduction and an
account of Burke's legacy. This edition fulfils Burke's own vision
of collecting in one volume his Shakespeare criticism, portions of
which had appeared in the many books he had published throughout
his lengthy career. Here, Burke examines Hamlet, Twelfth Night,
Julius Caesar, Venus and Adonis, Othello, Timon of Athens, Antony
and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, A
Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The
Tempest, Falstaff, the Sonnets, and Shakespeare's imagery. KENNETH
BURKE (1897-1993) was the author of many books, including the
landmark Motivorum trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric
of Motives (1950), and Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives,
1950-1955 (2007). He has been hailed as one of the most original
American thinkers of the twentieth century and possibly the
greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Burke's enduring familiarity
with Shakespeare helped shape his own theory of dramatism, an
ambitious elaboration of the "all the world's a stage" conceit.
Burke is renowned for his far-reaching 1951 essay on Othello, which
wrestles with concerns still relevant to scholars more than half a
century later; his imaginative ventriloquism of Mark Antony's
address over Caesar's body has likewise found a number of
appreciative readers, as have his many other essays on the
playwright. SCOTT L. NEWSTOK is Assistant Professor of English at
Gustavus Adolphus College and Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow
at Yale University.
Burke is back. This publication in print and digital formats of
previously unpublished writings of Kenneth Burke is an event not
just for Burke studies but for the wider community of readers
interested in understanding the "progress" of literature, literary
theory, culture, rhetoric, and philosophy in the late
twentieth-century.
Permanence and Change was written and first published in the depths
of the Great Depression. Attitudes Toward History followed it two
years later. These were revolutionary texts in the theory of
communication, and, as classics, they retain their surcharge of
energy. Permanence and Change treats human communication in terms
of ideal cooperation, whereas Attitudes Towards History
characterizes tactics and patterns of conflict typical of actual
human associations. It is in Permanence and Change that Burke
establishes in path-breaking fashion that form permeates society
just as it does poetry and the arts. Hence, his master idea that
forms of art are not exclusively aesthetic: the cycles of a storm,
the gradations of a sunrise, the stages of an epidemic, the undoing
of Prince Hamlet are all instances of progressive form. This new
edition of Permanence and Change reprints Hugh Dalziel Duncan's
long sociological introduction and includes a substantial new
afterward in which Burke reexamines his early ideas in light of
subsequent developments in his own thinking and in social theory.
This book marks Kenneth Burke's breakthrough in criticism from the
literary and aesthetic into social theory and the philosophy of
history. In this volume we find Burke's first entry into what he
calls his theory of Dramatism; and, here also is an important
section on the nature of ritual.
From the ForewordThese pieces are selections from work done in the
Thirties, a decade so changeable that I at first thought of
assembling them under the title, "While Everything Flows." Their
primary interest is in speculation on the nature of linguistic, or
symbolic, or literary action--and in a search for more precise ways
of locating or defining such action. Words are aspects of a much
wider communicative context, most of which is not verbal at all.
Yet words also have a nature peculiarly their own. And when
discussing them as modes of action, we must consider both this
nature as words in themselves and the nature they get from the
non-verbal scenes that support their acts. I shall be happy if the
reader can say of this book that, while always considering words as
acts upon a scene, it avoids the excess of environmentalist schools
which are usually so eager to trace the relationships between act
and scene that they neglect to trace the structure of the act
itself.
""A Grammar of Motives," published in 1945, is the first volume of
a gigantic trilogy, planned to include "A Rhetoric of Motives" and
"A Symbolic of Motives," which will be called something like "On
Human Relations," The aim of the whole series is no less than the
comprehensive exploration of human motives and the forms of thought
and expression built around them, and its ultimate object,
expression in the epigraph: "'ad bellum purificandum, '" is to
eliminate the whole world of conflict that can be eliminated
through understanding. The method or key metaphor for the study is
'drama' or 'dramatism, ' and the basic terms of analysis are the
dramatistic pentad: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose. The
"Grammar," which Burke confesses in the Introduction grew from a
prolegomena of a few hundred words to nearly 200,000, is a
consideration of the purely internal relationship of these five
terms, 'their possibilities of transformation, their range of
permutations and combinations'..."--Stanley Edgar Hyman, author of
"The Armed Vision"
From the Preface: The title for this collection was the title of a
course in literary criticism that I gave for many years at
Bennington College. And much of the material presented here was
used in that course. The title should serve well to convey the gist
of these various pieces. For all of them are explicitly concerned
with the attempt to define and track down the implications of the
term "symbolic action," and to show how the marvels of literature
and language look when considered form that point of view.
|
The War of Words (Hardcover)
Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer; Kenneth Burke
|
R2,700
Discovery Miles 27 000
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
When Kenneth Burke conceived his celebrated "Motivorum" project in
the 1940s and 1950s, he envisioned it in three parts. Whereas the
third part, A Symbolic of Motives, was never finished, A Grammar of
Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) have become
canonical theoretical documents. A Rhetoric of Motives was
originally intended to be a two-part book. Here, at last, is the
second volume, the until-now unpublished War of Words, where Burke
brilliantly exposes the rhetorical devices that sponsor war in the
name of peace. Discouraging militarism during the Cold War even as
it catalogues belligerent persuasive strategies and tactics that
remain in use today, The War of Words reveals how popular news
media outlets can, wittingly or not, foment international tensions
and armaments during tumultuous political periods. This
authoritative edition includes an introduction from the editors
explaining the compositional history and cultural contexts of both
The War of Words and A Rhetoric of Motives. The War of Words
illuminates the study of modern rhetoric even as it deepens our
understanding of post-World War II politics.
"But the point of Burke's work, and the significance of his
achievement, is not that he points out that religion and language
affect each other, for this has been said before, but that he
proceeds to demonstrate how this is so by reference to a specific
symbolic context. After a discussion 'On Words and The Word,' he
analysess verbal action in St. Augustine's Confessions. He then
discusses the first three chapters of Genesis, and ends with a
brilliant and profound 'Prologue in Heaven,' an imaginary dialogue
between the Lord and Satan in which he proposes that we begin our
study of human motives with complex theories of transcendence,'
rather than with terminologies developed in the use of simplified
laboratory equipment...Burke now feels, after some forty years of
search, that he has created a model of the symbolic act which
breaks through the rigidities of the 'sacred-secular' dichotomy,
and at the same time shows us how we get from secular and sacred
realms of action over the bridge of language...Religious systems
are systems of action based on communication in society. They are
great social dramas which are played out on earth before an
ultimate audience, God. But where theology confronts the developed
cosmological drama in the 'grand style,' that is, as a fully
developed cosmological drama for its religious content, the
'logologer' can be further studied not directly as knowledge but as
anecdotes that help reveal for us the quandaries of human
governance." (Hugh Dalziel Duncan from Critical Responses to
Kenneth Burke, 1924 - 1966, edited by William H. Rueckert
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969)).
"On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows "brings
together the late essays, autobiographical reflections, an
interview, and a poem by the eminent literary theorist and cultural
critic Kenneth Burke (1897-1993). Burke, author of "Language as
Symbolic Action, A Grammar of Motives, "and "Rhetoric of Motives,
"among other works, was an innovative and original thinker who
worked at the intersection of sociology, psychology, literary
theory, and semiotics. This book, a selection of fourteen
representative pieces of his productive later years, addresses many
important themes Burke tackled throughout his career such as
logology (his attempt to find a universal language theory and
methodology), technology, and ecology. The essays also elaborate
Burke's notions about creativity and its relation to stress,
language and its literary uses, the relation of mind and body, and
more. Provocative, idiosyncratic, and erudite, "On Human Nature
"makes a significant statement about cultural linguistics and is an
important rounding-out of the Burkean corpus.
Significantly deepening our understanding of two key figures from
the modernist period, The Humane Particulars collects the letters
between William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke. Written during
forty-two years of close friendship and literary debate, these
nearly 250 letters span two long lives, two complicated
personalities, and two brilliantly productive careers. The animated
exchange between a canonical poet and the leading American
rhetorical critic of the twentieth century offers a more complete
vision of their outlooks and their contributions to the shape and
tenor of the modernist scene. Set in context by James H. East's
introduction and explanatory notes, the letters begin just after
Burke and Williams's initial meeting in 1921 during a tramp through
a New Jersey swamp and surrounding meadowlands. Their written
exchange follows the maturing of their friendship and professional
regard. The correspondence shows that Williams and Burke were fast
friends during the experimental twenties, preoccupied by individual
and divergent projects in the thirties and early forties, and
reunited as enthusiastic correspondents after the Second World War.
The letters refer to happy times spent together - walks in the
woods, picnics and swimming, and visits to Burke's farm in Andover,
New Jersey. They reveal, among other interesting personal matters,
Burke's fascination with Williams's double life as physician and
poet, Burke's hypochondria, and Williams's at times chastising
medical advice to Burke. But, more important, the letters preserve
the continual wrangling over the origin and nature of literary form
that enlightened the pair's many disagreements. Of particular
interest, the correspondence documents a largely unexplored aspect
of Burke's career - his reciprocally influential relationship with
the writers of the late modern and midcentury periods.
A valuable feature of the second edition (1953) of
Counter-Statement was the Curriculum Criticum in which the author
placed the book in terms of his later work. For this new paperback
edition, Mr. Burke continues his "curve of development" in an
Addendum which surveys the course of his though in subsequent books
(up to the publication of his Collected Poems, 1915 - 1967) and
work-in-progress.
|
|