Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke is the largest collection of Burke's book reviews, most of them reprinted here for the first time. In these reviews, as he engages famous works of poetry, fiction, criticism, and social science from the early 20th century, Burke demonstrates the prominent methods and interests of his influential career.
“This well-written, accessible [essay] collection demonstrates a maturation in Jewish studies and medieval philosophy” (Choice). Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced.
By exploring central issues in the philosophy of literature, illustrated by a wide range of novels, poems, and plays, Philosophy of Literature gets to the heart of why literature matters to us and sheds new light on the nature and interpretation of literary works. Provides a comprehensive study, along with original insights, into the philosophy of literature Develops a unique point of view - from one of the field's leading exponents Offers examples of key issues using excerpts from well-known novels, poems, and plays from different historical periods
Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change, written by American literary theorist Kenneth Burke, was first published in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression. Burke followed this with Attitudes Toward History followed just two years later. His texts proved to be revolutionary in the theory of communication, and, as classics, retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, and in this book, Burke establishes, in ground-breaking fashion, that form permeates society, just as it does poetry and the arts. This present volume is the Second Edition, first published in 1954, and includes an Introduction by Hugh Dalziel Duncan. “Unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America.”—W. H. Auden “One of the truly speculative American thinkers of his era.”—Malcolm Cowley “The foremost critic of our time and perhaps the greatest critic since Coleridge.”—Stanley Edgar Hyman “What Burke has done better than anyone else is to find a way of connecting literature to life without reducing either. He’s had far less attention than he deserves because he’d been so far ahead of his time. But he’s one of the major minds of the twentieth century, and he’s sure to be read in the future.”—Wayne Booth
In the High Middle Ages, the dream narrative was an enormously popular and influential form. Along with the romance, it was perhaps the genre of the age. It has come down to us in such classics twelfth to fourteenth-century classics as The Divine Comedy, the Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Chaucer's early poetry, and the works of Guillaume de Machaut. This book redefines the dream vision by attending to its role in philosophical debate of the time, a conservative role in defense of the high medieval synthesis of reason and revelation. Lynch shows how the epistemological basis of this synthesis and the theories of visions that emerged from it drew on Arabic commentaries of Aristotle. These theories informed poetic visions modeled on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a work she discusses in detail before turning to Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, and Dante. A final section, on John Gower's Confessio Amantis shows how fourteenth and fifteenth-century writers extended and finally moved beyond the conventional form of the dream vision.
"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).
This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, deal with such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements.