Kenneth Burke S Logology And Literary Criticism

Kenneth Burke's Logology And Literary Criticism by Robert Garlitz Publisher: Xlibris Corporation (December 21, 2004) ISBN: 1413464084 DESCRIPTION One of America's greatest writers, critics and theorists, Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) engaged questions in nearly every field of knowledge and studied the ways language and literature relate to symbolic action in all aspects of life. His works have influenced the fields of aesthetics, ethics, rhetoric, communication, semiotics, and sociology, as well as literary studies. Kenneth Burke's Logology and Literary Criticism emphasizes the importance of religious ideas and religious rhetoric in the development of his work. "My Outlaw Book" is how Burke himself often referred to his book The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Robert Garlitz closely studies the four essays on Logology and argues that they show us more clearly than many of his other books the analogical forms of thought that shape Burke's brilliant contributions to twentieth century American letters. Garlitz concludes his book with a logological meditation on Joseph Conrad's epic novel, Nostromo. An Appendix publishes for the first time seven letters Kenneth Burke wrote to Garlitz in 1980-81. "One of the best studies of The Rhetoric of Religion . . . . Quite good for its detail, accuracy, and clarity. Garlitz is especially adept at putting complex material in perspective. More than other commentators . . .he fully recognizes the centrality of the analogy at the heart of the book, embracing the logic-narrative problem that Burke contemplates." --Ross Wolin author of The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke. University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Robert Garlitz received his PhD from the University of Chicago and is Professor of English at Plymouth State University. He is the author of Robert Lax: Speaking Into Silence and with Rupert Loydell, Snowshoes Across the Clouds.

Probes the nature of linguistic or symbolic action as it relates to specific novels, plays, and poems.

No isolated quotations can do justice to Mr. Burke's subtlety and good sense, and no doubts that one may entertain about the soundess of his critical position can obscure the fact that he is unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America. --W.H. Auden.

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.

Capturing the lively modernist milieu of Kenneth Burke's early career in Greenwich Village, where Burke arrived in 1915 fresh from high school in Pittsburgh, this book discovers him as an intellectual apprentice conversing with "the moderns." Burke found himself in the midst of an avant-garde peopled by Malcolm Cowley, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, Alfred Stieglitz, and a host of other fascinating figures. Burke himself, who died in 1993 at the age of 96, has been hailed as America's most brilliant and suggestive critic and the most significant theorist of rhetoric since Cicero. Many schools of thought have claimed him as their own, but Burke has defied classification and indeed has often been considered a solitary, eccentric genius immune to intellectual fashions. But Burke's formative work of the 1920s, when he first defined himself and his work in the context of the modernist conversation, has gone relatively unexamined. Here we see Burke living and working with the crowd of poets, painters, and dramatists affiliated with Others magazine, Stieglitz's "291" gallery, and Eugene O'Neill's Provincetown Players; the leftists associated with the magazines The Masses and Seven Arts; the Dadaists; and the modernist writers working on literary journals like The Dial, where Burke in his capacity as an associate editor saw T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" into print for the first time and provided other editorial services for Thomas Mann, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and many other writers of note. Burke also met the iconoclasts of the older generation represented by Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, the New Humanists, and the literary nationalists who founded Contact and The New Republic. Jack Selzer shows how Burke's own early poems, fiction, and essays emerged from and contributed to the modernist conversation in Greenwich Village. He draws on a wonderfully rich array of letters between Burke and his modernist friends and on the memoirs of his associates to create a vibrant portrait of the young Burke's transformation from aesthete to social critic.

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology is a lucid and accessible introduction to a major twentieth-century thinker those ideas have influenced fields as diverse as literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, politics and anthropology. Stephen Bygrave explores the content of Burke's vast output of work, focusing especially on his preoccupation with the relation between language, ideology and action. By considering Burke as a reader and writer of narratives and systems, Bygrave examines the inadequacies of earlier readings of Burke and unfolds his thought within current debates in Anglo-American cultural theory. This is an excellent re-evaluation of Burke's thought and valuble introduction to the impressive range of his ideas.