The Philosophy of Literary Form

by Kenneth Burke

Book Overview

From the Foreword These pieces are selections from work done in the Thirties, a decade so changeable that I at first thought of assembling them under the title, "While Everything Flows." Their primary... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520024834
• Release Date: August 1974
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 492 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.2" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

Not yet a fullfledged theory

Kenneth Burke is trying here to define the symbolic, though he makes it too empirical by speaking of symbolic action. This leads him to three levels of definition : the bodily or biological level ; the personal, intimate, familiar, familistic level ; the abstract level. We can see here that he does not encompass two essential levels : the historical, anthropological and social level for one in which the individual is animated by wider currents and forces, wider symbolisms and symbolic dimensions ; and on the other hand the purely spiritual level, very badly incorporated in the abstract level of his. He definitely misses a general purpose in human life : to reach a spiritual level of existence, in a way or another, and poetry and even all arts are one or many ways to do so, along with science, religion, meditation, etc. This is also due to the fact that this book (this collection of articles) is entirely inhabited by a binary thinking method : every phenomenon is reduced to dual oppositions. He then misses the « social aspect of authority » (p. 53). He becomes more interesting with his methodology. « The focus of critical analysis must be upon the structure of the given work itself. » I could not agree more but he then misses his own point. He reduces himself to a schematic hegelian caricature of a dialectic with the couple protagonist-antagonist. He tries to make it ternary by adding the agon, but the agon is nothing but the environment of the two others and hence is not of teh same nature. We remain binary, and that is going to be a plague further on. We can see his later approach of « dramatism » emerging, but it is still imperfect, incomplete and we jump to the artificial triad of the three voices (active, passive and middle or reflexive) and then his famous five terms (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) without reaching any decent level of elaboration of thiese concepts. But in this book he rermains pent-up in pre-WW2 and post-WW2 unquestioned axioms. He is literally obsessed by the sacrificial dimension of politics and history and that is more than a shortcoming when he approaches Hitler. He misses the meaning of Hitler entirely by reducing him to his rhetoric, hence to his purpose, his personal aim and does not take into account how his antisemitism and his extreme capitalistic vision of economics (capitalistic dictarorship with slavery in some concentration camps and ferocious repression of the working class) articulate on the historical, cultural and symbolical heritage of the German people, of christian Europe, of Christianity at large. It is too simple to reduce Hitlerism to a machiavellian leader verging onto paranoid neurosis or psychosis. This limitation is also obvious when he approaches Freud. His vision of poetry as a creative activity that creates its own language and network of meaning is enriched by psychoanalysis. And yet. He borrows from Freud the clustering technique that deduces the symbolical meaning of an item from its