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.

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.

While rhetoric as a discipline is firmly planted in humanism and anthropology, posthumanism seeks to leave the human behind. This highly original examination of Kenneth Burke's thought grapples with these ostensibly contradictory concepts as opportunities for invention, revision, and, importantly, transdisciplinary knowledge making. Rather than simply mapping posthumanist rhetorics onto Burke's scholarship, Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman focuses on the multiplicity of ideas found both in his work and in the idea of posthumanism. Taking varied approaches organized within a framework of boundaries and futures, the contributors show that studying the humanist theories of Burke in this way creates a satisfyingly chaotic web of interconnections. The essays look at how Burke's writing on the human mind and technology, from his earliest works to his very latest revisions, interrelates with current concepts such as new materiality and coevolution. Throughout, the contributors pay close attention to the fluidity, concerns, and contradictions inherent in language, symbolism, and subjectivity. A unique, illuminating exploration of the contested relationship between bodies and language, this inherently transdisciplinary book will propel important future inquiry by scholars of rhetoric, Burke, and posthumanism. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Casey Boyle, Kristie Fleckenstein, Nathan Gale, Julie Jung, Steven B. Katz, Steven LeMieux, Jodie Nicotra, Jeff Pruchnic, Timothy Richardson, Thomas Rickert, and Robert Wess.

While rhetoric as a discipline is firmly planted in humanism and anthropology, posthumanism seeks to leave the human behind. This highly original examination of Kenneth Burke's thought grapples with these ostensibly contradictory concepts as opportunities for invention, revision, and, importantly, transdisciplinary knowledge making. Rather than simply mapping posthumanist rhetorics onto Burke's scholarship, Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman focuses on the multiplicity of ideas found both in his work and in the idea of posthumanism. Taking varied approaches organized within a framework of boundaries and futures, the contributors show that studying the humanist theories of Burke in this way creates a satisfyingly chaotic web of interconnections. The essays look at how Burke's writing on the human mind and technology, from his earliest works to his very latest revisions, interrelates with current concepts such as new materiality and coevolution. Throughout, the contributors pay close attention to the fluidity, concerns, and contradictions inherent in language, symbolism, and subjectivity. A unique, illuminating exploration of the contested relationship between bodies and language, this inherently transdisciplinary book will propel important future inquiry by scholars of rhetoric, Burke, and posthumanism. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Casey Boyle, Kristie Fleckenstein, Nathan Gale, Julie Jung, Steven B. Katz, Steven LeMieux, Jodie Nicotra, Jeff Pruchnic, Timothy Richardson, Thomas Rickert, and Robert Wess.