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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 April 2015
Admired throughout the twentieth century by literary and sociological theorists but long neglected by philosophers, readers have overlooked Kenneth Burke's theoretical dependence on American philosophic realism, thus missing consistent patterns of his insight. By tracing Burke's own realism back to his year at Columbia University and his time at The Dial magazine, we see how Burke's earliest aesthetic theories conformed to aspects of the new realist movement. During the Depression, in his book Permanence and Change, he followed earlier new realists in arguing for a reconstructed modern teleology of “purpose” and incorporated realism within his pleas for a suppler Communist Party rhetoric than that sanctioned by the party leadership. Burke's apparently inconsistent positions can be understood as a continuous philosophical argument for realism within changing intellectual contexts, explaining his long-lived cross-disciplinary appeal and influence. Burke maintained central realistic tenets: (1) the independent existence and intelligibility of an external world and (2) the substantive meaning of universals, particularly a common human nature. Examining these connections informs our readings of Burke while illuminating one reverberation of the philosophical “new realists” in American intellectual culture. Burke expressed realist principles in his presentation of symbolic action and dramatism in The Philosophy of Literary Form and A Grammar of Motives, both published in the 1940s. His sophisticated aesthetic–linguistic realism appeared in his arguments against logical empiricists and New Critics, which displayed an arc of transformation in the philosophical and critical culture before World War II from a still-contested mixture to an emphatically nominalistic, antirealist one. It was from this philosophical position that Burke offered his lively, penetrating analyses of and challenges to many of the major movements in twentieth-century philosophy: realism, pragmatism, positivism, and post-structuralism.
I thank the readers of this article who greatly improved its accuracy and readability: historians Marcella Bencivenni, Martin Burke, Bob Huberty, Ernest Ialongo, Carol Quirke, Daniel Wishnoff, and philosophers Harvey Burstein and Lucia Lermond, as well as Modern Intellectual History's editors and reviewers. Many thanks also to the librarians of the Special Collections libraries at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago and NYPL's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. I am most grateful to Michael Burke, Julie Whittaker, and the Burke family for their gracious aid and hospitality. The writing of this article was funded by two PSC CUNY grants.
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134 Pickering, “The Roots of New Criticism,” 104–5.
135 John Crowe Ransom to Kenneth Burke, 19 Aug. 1941, Burke Papers, original emphasis.
136 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 226, 447, 462–3.
137 John Crowe Ransom, “Mr. Burke's Dialectic,” New Republic, 18 Feb. 1946, 257–8.
138 Burke to Ransom, 10 March 1945 (two drafts), Burke Papers, original emphasis.
139 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 429, 454–5.
140 Gillespie, Theological Origins, 23–5.
141 Daniel Rogers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 10.
142 Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies , vol. 1 (London, 1945); and Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox (London, 1953)Google Scholar, find Plato “totalitarian.”
143 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 248.
144 Kenneth Burke to Richard McKeon, 1 June 1944, McKeon Papers.
145 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 512.
146 Burke, Kenneth, “The Anaesthetic Revelation of Herone Liddell,” Kenyon Review, 19 (1957), 505–59, at 521–2.Google Scholar
147 Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 2, 96, 161, 222, 373, 476.
148 Kenneth Burke, “Approaches to Remy de Gourmont” (1921), revised as “Three Adepts of ‘Pure’ Literature,” and reprinted in Burke, Counter-statement, 1–28, at 19.
