Kenneth Burke--rhetorician, philosopher, linguist, sociologist, literary and music critic, crank--was one of the foremost theorists of literary form. He did not fit tidily into any philosophical school, nor was he reducible to any simple set of principles or ideas. He published widely, and is probably best known for two of his classic works, A Rhetoric of Motive and Philosophy of Literary Form. His observations on myth, however, were never systematic, and much of his writing on literary theory and other topics cannot be fully understood without fleshing out his thoughts on myth and mythmaking.
The writings of twentieth-century thinker Kenneth Burke span seven decades and extend into multiple disciplines. What makes Burke's work so far-reaching in its influence also makes it difficult to define or categorize. This study by C. Allen Carter examines one particular issue of recurring concern for Burke: the tendency of human beings to seek out scapegoats or victims. By demonstrating the centrality of this theme in the entire range of works by Burke, Carter offers a valuable approach to understanding the philosophy as a whole. As Carter explains, scapegoating for Burke is a complex process that is above all language-based. Throughout his career, Burke was preoccupied with the ways recurring patterns in language - most prominently in literature - represent significant patterns of human behavior. And a defining feature of language, Burke argued, is its reliance on moral negatives, or the constant "thou shalt not" commands that govern people's actions and ensure cooperation within a group or society. However, because it is impossible for anybody to abide by all the rules all the time, the result is ubiquitous guilt. Insecure individuals are driven by "hierarchical motives": the urge to raise their own status in the social order by lowering the status of someone else - in other words, to target another individual who will represent the infectious evils from which the group wants to be released. Carter shows how Burke's preoccupation with this universal pattern of human behavior permeated his celebrated analyses of texts, such as the Bible and the Greek tragedies, in which the pattern is clearly exposed.
The writings of twentieth-century thinker Kenneth Burke span seven decades and extend into multiple disciplines. What makes Burke's work so far-reaching in its influence also makes it difficult to define or categorize. This study by C. Allen Carter examines one particular issue of recurring concern for Burke: the tendency of human beings to seek out scapegoats or victims. By demonstrating the centrality of this theme in the entire range of works by Burke, Carter offers a valuable approach to understanding the philosophy as a whole. As Carter explains, scapegoating for Burke is a complex process that is above all language-based. Throughout his career, Burke was preoccupied with the ways recurring patterns in language - most prominently in literature - represent significant patterns of human behavior. And a defining feature of language, Burke argued, is its reliance on moral negatives, or the constant "thou shalt not" commands that govern people's actions and ensure cooperation within a group or society. However, because it is impossible for anybody to abide by all the rules all the time, the result is ubiquitous guilt. Insecure individuals are driven by "hierarchical motives": the urge to raise their own status in the social order by lowering the status of someone else - in other words, to target another individual who will represent the infectious evils from which the group wants to be released. Carter shows how Burke's preoccupation with this universal pattern of human behavior permeated his celebrated analyses of texts, such as the Bible and the Greek tragedies, in which the pattern is clearly exposed.
"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).
KENNETH BURKE: FROM MYTH TO ECOLOGY is the first full-length study of a remarkable thinker's approach to those founding narratives, those essential structures of thought, which cannot be credited to any one individual but rather belong to the whole community.
Since 9/11, war literature has become a key element in American popular culture, spurring critical debate about depictions of combat--Who can write war literature? When can they do it? This book presents a new way to closely read war narratives, questioning the idea of "combat gnosticism"--the belief that the experience of war is impossible to communicate to those who have not seen it--that has dominated the discussion. Adapting Kenneth Burke's scapegoat mechanism to the criticism of literature and film, the author examines three novels from 2012--Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, David Abrams's FOBBIT and Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds--that represent the U.S. military responses to 9/11.
Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke focuses on the little-known but important friendship between two canonical American writers. The story of this fifty-year friendship, however, is more than literary biography; Bryan Crable argues that the Burke-Ellison relationship can be interpreted as a microcosm of the American "racial divide." Through examination of published writings and unpublished correspondence, he reconstructs the dialogue between Burke and Ellison about race that shaped some of their most important works, including Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and Ellison's Invisible Man. In addition, the book connects this dialogue to changes in American discourse about race. Crable shows that these two men were deeply connected, intellectually and personally, but the social division between white and black Americans produced hesitation, embarrassment, mystery, and estrangement where Ellison and Burke might otherwise have found unity. By using Ellison's nonfiction and Burke's rhetorical theory to articulate a new vocabulary of race, the author concludes not with a simplistic "healing" of the divide but with a challenge to embrace the responsibility inherent to our social order. American Literatures Initiative
In 'The Scapegoat', the author audaciously turns to classical mythology, medieval narrative, and the New Testament to explore the scenes behind 'texts of persecution, ' documents that recount collective violence from the standpoint of the persecutor.
An in-depth analysis of the composition of Invisible Man and Ralph Ellisons move away from the radical left during his writing of the novel between 1945 and 1952.
