Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1977

Keywords

Kenneth Burke, Criticism and interpretation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric

First Advisor

John Macksoud

Second Advisor

Zack Bowen

Third Advisor

Bernard S. Levy

Abstract

This dissertation on Kenneth Burke locates him in selected contexts of modern thought and New Criticism designed to reveal his distinctive contribution as a theorist of language and literature.

Most of the substantial studies of Burke that we have, like William Rueckert’s excellent book, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, are intrinsic in method. They explain Burke’s system from within, as a formalist critic would explain a poem. Similarly, the best works on modern criticism, such as Murray Krieger’s The New Apologists for Poetry, and the last part of William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks’s Literary Criticism: A Short History, leave Burke out of account, because of the difficulty of assimilating him to the well-defined categories of modern criticism. In consequence, there are few if any studies which seek to understand Burke in comparison with and contrast to other thinkers who have made a significant impact on our sense of language and literature. Such is my aim.

To this end, the poetics of Burke and the New Critics are placed in the contexts of three related theories of meaning, derived from the views of language-using and communication held by A.J. Ayer, a persuasive exponent of logical positivism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the founder of ordinary language philosophy, and Bronisław Malinowski, a pioneer of anthropological linguistics. Each is presented as a kind of screen, against which I project Burke and the New Critic’s way of looking at the issues that concern them both.

In chapter one, the New Critic’s epistemological apology for poetry is seen as a rejoinder to the positivist view that poetry offers only emotional release, and that the cognitive powers of language belong uniquely to the scientist. Then, both sides of this dispute are looked at from the standpoint of Burke's alternative apology for poetry, which values it not for its cognitive power, nor primarily for its therapeutic uses, but rather for its rhetorical and ritual functions. In chapter two, the discussion is carried into the theoretical territory of ordinary language philosophy, which itself arose in response to the excesses of positivism, and which I argue offers a theory of meaning fully adequate to the contextualist poetics of New Criticism. Thus, the New Critic holds that meaning in poetry is a function of linguistic context, a notion shown to be compatible with Wittgenstein’s view that the meaning of a word is its use. I further suggest that this view of meaning is wholly inadequate to Burke’s dramatistic poetics, which are based on the assumptions developed in chapter three, involving the work of Malinowski, who was an important source of Burke’s later theories of rhetoric and communication. Here, meaning in language is seen as a function of “the context of situation,” a concept developed by Malinowski and extended by Burke in his theory of literature as the adoption of various strategies for the encompassing of situations.

Finally, in chapter four, all of these somewhat specialized themes are woven into a more general discussion of the relationships among drama, poetry, dialectic, the individual, and society. Here an attempt is made to relate two contrasting forms of literature, ritual drama and Romantic poetry, to the critical controversies that have excited the modern imagination. In the light of these hypothetical links among critical theory, literary forms, and the malingering malaise of our time, Burke’s methods and attitudes, which embody his philosophy of art and life, are appraised for their scope, depth, and proportion.

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