[KB] KB Digest, Vol 58, Issue 1

[Jarron Slater]

Thanks for this insightful information. Is anyone working on a
non-scholarly biography of Burke? It seems that there is a need for--and
has been for a while--a biography about Burke introducing him to a wide
audience.

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 10:46 AM <kb-request at kbjournal.org> wrote:

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>    1. Burke and Sontag (Wess, Robert Victor)
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>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Wess, Robert Victor" <robert.wess at oregonstate.edu>
> To: "kb at kbjournal.org" <kb at kbjournal.org>
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2019 19:18:25 +0000
> Subject: [KB] Burke and Sontag
> Burke appears on a few pages in Benjamin Moser's Sontag: Her Life and Work
> (2019), in his chapter on her time at the University of Chicago (chapter 7).
>
> As the following sentence suggests, Moser knows little about Burke: "One
> of the great eminences of Chicago, Burke was hardly well known outside it"
> (98).
>
> Moser relates two stories I'd heard before, but he also identifies sources
> for them new to me. Maybe there are other sources.
>
> One is the story of Burke identifying himself in a class by writing "Mr.
> Burke" on the blackboard, then Sontag asking after class if he is "Kenneth
> Burke." Burke says yes and asks why she wants to know. She explains that
> she had read PC, PLF, and GM. Source: Leland Poague, ed. Conversations with
> Susan Sontag, Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. p. 275. Sontag was only 16
> when she started at Chicago in the 1949-50 school year. When she was 14,
> her high school principal told her mother that she had already read more
> books than her English teacher (79). Sontag placed out of most of the
> freshman and sophomore courses, and graduated in two years.
>
> The other is Burke's claim that Sontag was the best student he ever had.
> Source: Carl E. Rollyson and Lisa Olson Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making
> of an Icon, NY: Norton, 2000, p 32. Burke's claim appears in a letter to
> Hyman, 8/13/63, where Burke is evidently talking about Sontag's novel, The
> Benefactor, which he mentions in his article on Nightwood. Burke also
> writes Sontag about the novel on 7/25/63.
>
> Moser says Burke interested Sontag particularly because of his connections
> to Hart Crane and Djuna Barnes. "For Susan, Burke was a direct connection
> to the world to which she aspired" (99). In her class with Burke, Sontag
> wrote a paper on Nightwood. Moser says this paper survives in the Sontag
> Papers, which are in Collection 612 at UCLA Library Special Collections.
>
> Bob
>
>
>
>
>
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