Burke, Kenneth Duva

BURKE, KENNETH DUVA (1897-1993) can fairly be called the first major critical theorist of the Depression era American Left and its most significant propaganda theorist. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, after he finished high school, his family moved to Weehawken, NJ. Burke studied literature and philosophy briefly at Ohio State and Columbia Universities, taking no degrees, but at Ohio began a short-lived literary journal named sansculotte with friend James Light. A modernist poet and fiction writer for the Greenwich Village “little magazines,” Burke worked on staff at the 1920s Dial under poet Marianne Moore. After receiving the last Dial Award in 1929, he bought a small farm in New Jersey, where he lived, raising five children from two marriages and growing much of the family’s food.

Burke’s critical reputation began with Counter-Statement (1931). An autodidact, his discussions of literature included neurological research as well as rhetorical considerations of audience. Burke advocated creative leisure and agrarian self-reliance––what he called “agro-bohemianism; his “countering” of capitalist culture developed from his perspective as an artist. Against the reigning fiscal conservatism of the period, Counter-Statement included a “Program,” arguing for the “dole” and a welfare state.

A leftist critic of style and erudition, Burke contributed book reviews and essays to the New Masses, The New Republic, The Nation, as well as to more specialized literary journals. A longer manuscript draft “Auscultation, Creation and Revision: the Rout of the Aesthetes or Literature, Marxism, and Beyond,” was rejected and languished until 1993. Burke also published the novel Towards a Better Life (1931), a romantic drama in the form of various “declamations.” A litterateur at heart, Burke did appear occasionally on picket lines, at one point shouting “we write for the workers!”

At the First American Writers’ Congress in April 1935, sponsored by the League of American Writers (LAW), Burke gave an oft-cited speech on propaganda, “Revolutionary Symbolism in America.” Speaking to leftist writers, he made two points. First, he recommended that in persuading the larger American public to consider socialism, writers should use familiar American political vernacular, replacing the term “worker” or “proletariat” with “the people.” Besides its local history, Burke argued that “the people” was more inclusive; this pointed up a rhetorical contradiction between the Marxists’ bourgeois/proletarian binary and their universalistic ideals. His audience objected. Burke’s opinions on local lore and unity were slightly ahead of the curve, soon to appear in the rhetoric of coalescing anti-fascism known as the “popular front.”

Permanence and Change (1935) presented Burke’s ontology for communitarian social change and its follow-up, Attitudes toward History (1937) offered his sociology. He identified “poetry” with persuasion and analyzed the rise and fall of ideological authority from a Left perspective, developing a modern view of rhetoric and communication. In those early books and subsequent ones, Burke developed his unique terminology, including “perspective by incongruity,” “symbolic action” and “acceptance frames,” representing the interplay of ideological perspectives, power, and symbols in language, decades before poststructuralists. His focus on intimate biography in the title essay of The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) and his suggestion that critics use all available interpretive “arsenal” was at odds with the period’s conservative New Criticism.

Burke continued to address League of American Writers’ congresses. A 1939 speech on Hitler’s Mein Kampf, aimed to “discover what kind of medicine this medicine-man has concocted,” using rhetorical analysis. He also served as a fiction editor on Direction, a League magazine. While not a Communist Party member, the first editions of his “thirty-minded” books and some editorials displayed Burke’s faith in Soviet leadership despite the Moscow Trials and the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact. Though Burke taught part-time at the University of Chicago and at Bennington College for two decades, during the McCarthy era, he was rejected for a guest lectureship at the University of Washington due to this earlier fellow traveling and continuing leftist sympathies.

His two best-known books are from a planned trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). The third book, “A Symbolic . . .” was never completed. The Grammar presented his systematic approach to the philosophic question: “What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” Burke’s “Dramatism” built on interlocking relations in his “pentad” of “Act,” “Scene,” “Agent,” “Agency,” and “Purpose.” The Rhetoric followed as a “philosophy of rhetoric;” and addressed issues of hierarchy, social order, scapegoating and sacrifice as expressed in linguistic actions. Not only did Burke here challenge both positivism and existentialism, his examples boldly criticized American policies and early Cold War political rhetoric. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1961), examined language at the “highest level” of emotional expression and included explorations of Augustine’s Confessions, and Genesis. His last major overview was Language as Symbolic Action in 1966.

Burke lectured and published into his nineties, writing noted essays on Shakespeare as well as Keats, Yeats and Coleridge. He taught, debated, befriended and corresponded with many of the twentieth century’s major poets, literary theorists, sociologists and philosophers. These comprise an extraordinary group: Katherine Ann Porter, William Carlos Williams, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Howard Nemerov, Erving Goffman, Clifford Geertz, Susan Sontag, Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentriccia, Hayden White, Talcott Parsons, Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Sidney Hook, Malcolm Cowley and Morris Raphael Cohen are just a few. The largest collection of his papers is at Pennsylvania State University.

Burg, Evelyn. “Fellow Traveling along the Popular Front: Kenneth Burke’s Two Attitudes toward History,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 14, no. 1, 2020: 37-74.

Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

George, Ann and Jack Selzer. Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.

Hawhee, Debra. “Propaganda among the Ruins,” Chapter 17 in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, ed. Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo. New York: Oxford University Press online, 2014. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199764419.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199764419

KB Journal: The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society, edited by David Blakesley. https://www.kbjournal.org/

Kenneth Burke Papers, 1918-2008. Finding Aid. Penn State University Libraries. https://libraries.psu.edu/findingaids/6369.htm