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Kenneth Burke and His Circles From Kenneth Burke and His Circles. Ed. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. (c) 2008 by Parlor Press. All rights reserved. Used at Academia.edu by permission of the publisher. Find out more about this book at http://www.parlorpress.com/circles.html Kenneth Burke and His Circles Edited by Jack Selzer and Robert Wess Parlor Press West Lafayette, Indiana www.parlorpress.com From Kenneth Burke and His Circles. Ed. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. (c) 2008 by Parlor Press. All rights reserved. Used at Academia.edu by permission of the publisher. Find out more about this book at http://www.parlorpress.com/circles.html Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906 © 2008 by Parlor Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kenneth Burke and his circles / edited by Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. p. cm. Based on papers presented at a conference held at University Park, Pa. from July 10-12, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-60235-067-0 (acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-066-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-068-7 (adobe ebook) 1. Burke, Kenneth, 1897-1993--Criticism and interpretation. I. Selzer, Jack. II. Wess, Robert. PS3503.U6134Z69 2008 818’.5209--dc22 2008024442 Cover Image: “Retro Scroll” © 2007 by Aleksandar Velasevic. Used by permission. Cover design by David Blakesley. Printed on acid-free paper. Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [email protected]. From Kenneth Burke and His Circles. Ed. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. (c) 2008 by Parlor Press. All rights reserved. Used at Academia.edu by permission of the publisher. Find out more about this book at http://www.parlorpress.com/circles.html Contents Abbreviations of Works by Kenneth Burke vii Introduction ix Jack Selzer and Robert Wess ix 1 From Acceptance to Rejection: Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, and Invisible Man 3 Bryan Crable 3 2 An Interview with Ben Belitt: On Kenneth Burke’s Bennington Years 27 Michael Jackson 27 3 Denis Donoghue’s Kenneth Burke 40 Miriam Marty Clark 40 4 Burke’s McKeon Side: Burke’s Pentad and McKeon’s Quartet 49 Robert Wess 49 5 Essentializing Temporality, Temporizing Essence: The Narrative Theory and Interpretive Practice of Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth 68 Greig Henderson 68 6 Style and the Defense of Rhetoric: Burke’s and Aristotle’s Competing Models of Mind 86 James Kastely 86 7 Aesthetic Power and Rhetorical Experience 96 Gregory Clark 96 v From Kenneth Burke and His Circles. Ed. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. (c) 2008 by Parlor Press. All rights reserved. Used at Academia.edu by permission of the publisher. Find out morevi about this book at http://www.parlorpress.com/circles.html Contents 8 The Romantic in the Attic: William Blake’s Place in Kenneth Burke’s Intellectual Circle 109 Laura E. Rutland 109 9 Leveraging a Career with Kenneth Burke: The Politics of Theory in Literary Studies 120 Cary Nelson 120 10 Kenneth Burke and the Claims of a Rhetorical Poetry 129 Melissa Girard 129 11 The “Logological Organizing” of Corporate Discourse: A Burkean Case-Study Analysis 149 Peter M. Smudde 149 12 Still the King of Queens? Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, and the Theorizing of Rhetoric and Religion Now 161 Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter 161 13 The Revelations of “Logology”: Secular and Religious Tensions in Burke’s Views on Language, Literature, and Hermeneutics 174 Christine E. Iwanicki 174 14 Burkean Perspectives on Prayer: Charting a Key Term through Burke’s Corpus 201 William T. FitzGerald 201 Works Cited 223 Contributors 237 Index of Names and Titles 241 From Kenneth Burke and His Circles. Ed. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. (c) 2008 by Parlor Press. All rights reserved. Used at Academia.edu by permission of the publisher. Find out more about this book at http://www.parlorpress.com/circles.html 4 Burke’s McKeon Side: Burke’s Pentad and McKeon’s Quartet Robert Wess Close friends from the time they met while attending Columbia, Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon together form one of Burke’s many circles, one that survives in their correspondence as well as in discernible affinities in their published work.1 The overlap between McKeon’s quartet—thing, thought, word, and action—and Burke’s pentad arguably provides the best place for Burkeans to begin to look at Burke and McKeon together, and it will serve that purpose here.2 In addition, we’ll conclude our examination of the two together with a defense based on McKeon of the final part of “Terministic Screens,” which Burke calls “Our Attempt to Avoid Mere Relativism.” This famous essay, with its argument that terminologies are “selec- tions” and therefore “deflections” as much as “reflections,” seems to fit snuggly into the constructivist line of argument informing anti- foundational theory and its rejection of naïve verbal realism. But then this final part seems to do an about face by making a foundational claim. Antifoundational purists no doubt see inconsistency in Burke’s combination of the linguistic skepticism characteristic of postmodern antifoundationalism with a linguistic realism that seems often to have foundational status. McKeon provides a philosophical context within which it becomes apparent that the inconsistency is on the side of the purists rather than Burke. Correspondence suggests that Burke associated his interests in the- ory, as distinct from his literary interests, with McKeon. In a 1974 let- ter, for example, Burke briefly recollects the beginning of their friend- ship (their “first communing when adolescent at Columbia”), and then 49 From Kenneth Burke and His Circles. Ed. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. (c) 2008 by Parlor Press. All rights reserved. Used at Academia.edu by permission of the publisher. Find out more50 about this book at http://www.parlorpress.com/circles.html Robert Wess relates an evening many years later when the Burkes, the Cowleys, and the McKeons partied together: I was so happy, I fell into compulsive sleepiness, with Dick lugging me by one arm, Malcolm by the other (we seemed to be on the road to somewhere), and me coming-to only now and then enough to call for anoth- er drink. [. .] Somehow or other, Dick and Malcolm seemed to me like contrary loyalties within me—and in my plasterdom under such conditions all seemed resolved. (Letter to Howard Nemerov) Burke repeats this recollection directly to McKeon in a 1979 letter, using the phrase “seemed resolved” to bring the letter to an end. Burke also depicts this same self-division much earlier, in a passage in a 1921 letter to Matthew Josephson, at which time Burke would have been 24, McKeon 21; only this time, while McKeon is again on one side, it’s William Carlos Williams on the other (along with Contact, Williams’s new journal at the time).3 In this passage, however, unlike the later ones, there is no sense of resolution. Instead, the “contrary loyalties” dividing Burke are fleshed out a bit and Burke is resolute in affirming that he resides in a state of contradiction: Strangely enough, the one bright spot in my intel- lectual life is McKeon, whom I see once every couple of weeks, and who is a consolation to me because he knows things. True, this may wear off when he final- ly leaves school; but for the present, at least, it is still with him and is vitally operating. Christ! with all the wishy-wash of modern mouthing, it is positively invig- orating to discuss what this man maintains and that man rebuts, wherein so-and-so is differentiated from so-and-so, how one thing can be divided and other things grouped. Williams and his damned Contact . who in the hell cares what the noumenon is? . the remarkable thing is the intricacy of the dance around it. Or, to borrow a point from a review I wrote of Wil- liams’s new book: Given a warm fire and the wind howling outside, Kant sits down and works out the categorical imperative; but Williams would never get over the delight in how warm he was and how ineffec- From Kenneth Burke and His Circles. Ed. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. (c) 2008 by Parlor Press. All rights reserved. Used at Academia.edu by permission of the publisher. Find out moreBurke’s about McKeon this book Side at http://www.parlorpress.com/circles.html 51 tually the wind was raging outside. And I, personally, vote for the categorical imperative, although Williams is obviously right in his simplicity and Kant is obvi- ously wrong in his intricacy. While Burke divides himself into two in these letters, there are surely more than just two (see Rueckert, “Some”). I stress the exis- tence of many Burkes to suggest not only that just one of these seems particularly prominent in his relationship with McKeon (Josephson was horrified to hear that Burke was consorting with McKeon [Selz- er 215n59]), but also, and more importantly, to contrast Burke and McKeon on this score. Whereas there are many Burkes, there is, I be- lieve, only one McKeon. One way to get a sense of the identity of this one McKeon is through recollections of his teaching by former students.
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