Description

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.

Michael Burke, Swan Dive. New York: Carvel Books.

Michael Burke forwarded to us an on-line review of Swan Dive by Teri Davis. Here are excerpts

Below is the review for Swan Dive. I loved it.

By Andy King

LONG ANTICIPATED! EAGERLY AWAITED! It is out now!!!!

“I go about my garden reading passages from the essays aloud! I feel like Walt Whitman braying out Homer on the horse cars. Nearly every sentence is superbly formed. I have never read such a beautifully edited and fluent book. This book enlists rhetoric to help solve the problems of education.

Floyd D. Anderson, The College at Brockport: State University of New York and Matthew T. Althouse. The College at Brockport: State University of New York.

Abstract

Is Kenneth Burke's pentad actually a hexad? The answer is complicated. Early in his career, Burke favors just five terms—act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose—in his dramatistic vocabulary. In fact, he compares these concepts with fingers on a hand. However, as Burke’s thinking evolves, this hand sprouts a sixth digit—attitude. The present study investigates the ambiguity surrounding the pentad and the hexad, and it yields two conclusions. First, the pentad is already a hexad, with attitude classed under the headings of act, agent, and agency. Second, despite the adequacy of the pentad, Burke and others have demonstrated the efficacy, if not the necessity, of hexadic analysis in fully discerning the sources of human motivation. Our survey of relevant literature clarifies ambiguities about the pentad and explores whether or not attitude should be treated as the sixth term of a hexad.

KB:     You see the original formula I used, the medieval formula: quis? quid? ubi? quibus auxillis? cur? quo modo? quando? is a hexameter line.¹ Dick McKeon had not noticed that himself. If the terms are put in exactly that order, they make a line of verse in classical Latin prosody. I cheated in a way when I worked with it as a pentad, and I always think that I did it as a pentad because I only had five children. If I’d had six….
FG²:    If you’d had nine!
KB:     Oh God!
--Kenneth Burke ("Counter-Gridlock" 366)

Clark Rountree, University of Alabama Huntsville

Abstract

In 1984 Kenneth Burke particpated in a panel discussion over the nature of dramatism, insisting that it was literally descriptive of human symbol-using, while some leading Burkeans on the panel insisted that dramatism was metaphorical. This essay revisits that controversy and argues that Burke consistently maintained that dramatism provides a universal heuristic of human motives.

Brian T. Kaylor

Abstract

Judge Roy Moore brought both condemnation and praise for his attempts to keep his Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama state courthouse building. This study examines the responses to Moore in light of Kenneth Burke’s poetic frames to suggest the existence and impact of simultaneous and contradictory frames. The frames of epic, comic, and burlesque are traced, and implications thereof for Moore’s situation and for Burkean frames.

Michael Burke, Swan Dive. New York: Carvel Books.

Elsewhere in this journal we print the on-line reviewer Teri Davis takes on Michael Burke’s new novel, Swan Dive. Here we do our own review.

Brian Bailie, Syracuse University

Abstract

How do we understand acts of protest using social networking technology as their respective starting points, and the temporary groups formed in these moments of tech orchestrated protest? How do the antithetical rhetorical acts of the corporations that market these technologies help create a context (scene) where these temporary groups are continually interpreted as unimportant? To answer these questions, I plan to give a brief description of “smart mobs,” and then discuss how a small, recent smart mob used technology to its advantage. To demonstrate how technology is the correct and appropriate channel for these types of protest groups as they try to attain their goals, I place this smart mob in Burke’s pentad, and at the same time, show how the larger societal belief in technology as a magic fetish object hinders a straightforward act of communicating discontent. To demonstrate the hurdles a smart mob must overcome to be taken seriously, I also place the antithesis of the smart mob, the corporation, into its own pentad. Then, through the use of this pentad, I show how my representative smart mob’s attempt at protest is complicated by the digital scene created by corporations—a scene which follows the archetypical narrative of technology as only a boon to the social status quo and corporate capitalism.

Weiser, M. Elizabeth. Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2008.

W.B. Worthen. Drama: Between Poetry and Performance. United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Anderson, Dana.  Identity’s Strategy: Rhetorical Selves in Conversion.  Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2007.

Rountree, Clarke. Judging the Supreme Court: Constructions of Motives in Bush v. Gore. Rhetoric and Public Affairs. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2007.

Editor’s note: The book is dedicated to KB’s grandson, Harry Chapin, Larry Baker’s good friend.

Baker, Larry. A Good Man. Ice Cube Books.