Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
href="#uaa791dd5-a851-5609-a797-450c9647cc4c">The ‘Christ-Dionysus Link’
New York Herald Tribune Books Reviews, 1923 to 1929
Appendix B: Reviews by Journal
Appendix C: Reviews in Chronological Order
Preface
In editing Kenneth Burke’s literary reviews, we tried to make very few changes to the source texts. For archival purposes, these reviews are best presented with as little alteration as possible to preserve most completely Burke’s original work. The toughest decision to make was deciding what counted as a literary review. Since Burke routinely centers discussions around the analysis of texts, it is often difficult to distinguish literary criticism from metacriticism. Relying on the criteria and catalogs created by William Rueckert and extended by Richard Thames, David Blakesley, and Clark Rountree for the bibliographies now available online at KB Journal, reviews were determined to be those pieces that evaluated a specific text or texts and were identified by the publication itself as literary reviews.
Once collected, these reviews presented only minor editing complications. Because Burke is notorious for playing with usage for effect, his style is often unconventional. It would sacrifice some of his meaning and intent to alter clever italicizations or punctuation that does not conform to style guides; however, these reviews were also subject to the specific conventions of journals and history, such as spelling and citation style. Those anomalies that seemed to be the result of editorial decisions or contemporary conventions were normalized, but those deemed Burkeian were left intact. As a result, only minor changes were necessary, such as spelling “colour” as “color” or changing the notation of Waldo Frank’s novel “Dark Mother” to Dark Mother.
Issues of organization were more complex. While there are several ways to present these reviews, we have decided to group them thematically to maximize their accessibility. Thematic organization will allow readers to notice trends and connections between reviews on similar topics. The categories for organization are fairly basic (e.g., fiction, poetry, sociology), and the scope of these categories is narrow enough to provide insight but broad enough to avoid specialization. Because Burke can easily turn a review of a novel into an essay on economics, the reviews are placed in categories based on the subject of the book under review. We readily admit, however, that this categorization does not reflect, to borrow again from Burke, how God himself divided-up the world. For instance, "Puritans Defended" here falls under "History"; it could just as easily have been placed under "Religion." We have self-consciously opted for, out of necessity, the Philosophy of the Bin. We recognize, as well, that the bins we have created do not necessarily contain all of Burke's collected literary reviews, and that some would count what we have discounted. Additionally, because of financial issues surrounding the permissions for Burke's reviews published in the New York Herald Tribune Books, those reviews do not appear in this collection. See Appendix A for an extended, critical discussion of those now excised reviews. We aimed to produce as complete and accessible a collection as various recalcitrants allowed. Within categories, reviews are grouped chronologically by journal. For example, all reviews from the journal with the earliest review are listed first, followed by those from the journal with the second earliest review. Additionally, alternative tables of content have been provided—one organized by journal, another by strict chronology—to allow readers to approach the reviews from different angles.
In compiling these literary reviews we have been aided mightily by the time and talents of others. David Blakesley has shepherded this project with the patience of a saint and guidance of a consummate educator. The Burke Literary Trust has likewise aided the project both by granting us permission to reprint Burke's work and by expressing genuine interest in the project. Many others have likewise provided support and guidance along the way. Thomas M. Rivers reviewed several versions of the introduction, as did Irwin Weiser. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess pointed the way to previously "lost" reviews. Debra Hawhee provided encouragement early on, as did the Kenneth Burke Society, which graciously awarded us the title of Emerging Burke Scholars for our work on this collection. We also want to thank these professional writing majors at Purdue University for their copyediting work on the manuscript: Kate Bouwens, Summer Carder, Alexandra Cash, Jessica Clements, Shawn Dildine, Daniel Elliott, Ryan Gardner, MacKenzie Greenwell, Kate Jackett, Mikel Livingston, Kaye Maloney, Suzie Mason, Caroline Mochel, Jennifer Norman, Holly Pierson, Patrick Qi, Francesca San Pedro, Samantha Schneider, Kristen Short, and Margaret Zahm.
We would like to thank many times over Joseph Sellers, the talented artist who produced the most excellent cover of this book. With very little direction, Joseph produced a design perfectly suited to the themes and historical contexts of many of Burke's literary reviews.
Finally, we wish to thank Jodi Rasche Rivers and Anna Lowe Weber for their love, support, and patience during the project.
Introduction
Nathaniel A. Rivers and Ryan P. Weber
Kenneth Burke’s critical approach resists containment. Reading through this collection, this elusiveness seems intentional. Perhaps a metaphor, or several, would be helpful. In his essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Burke characteristically piles metaphor on top of metaphor, each helpful in describing attributes of literature while suggesting incongruent directions. Literature is medicine. Literature is strategy. Literature is attitude. Literature is vehicle. Literature is sociology. But these metaphors are not as incongruent as they seem; they are active categories. Burke writes: “Art forms like ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘satire’ would be treated as equipments for living, that size up situations in various ways” (Philosophy of Literary Form 304). For Burke, literature is not to be passively absorbed, but actively applied. Books are strategies, written with specific attitudes, drawn from specific situations to address recurrent situations. Burke opens The Philosophy of Literary Form, a book about criticism that collects some of his criticism, with this very idea. “Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situations in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers” (1).1
One of the many nuances of the “equipment for living” metaphor is that it applies as equally to the creation of literature as to its criticism. We seek strategies for life in literature, whether we are writing it or reading it. Burke says this about the strategizing of the author: “One seeks to ‘direct the larger movements and operations’ in one’s campaign of living. One ‘maneuvers,’ and the maneuvering is an ‘art’” (298). Readers, using these maneuverings, can discern different strategies in different books, so they would be wise to have available as many approaches as possible. Each book, in this way, is medicine, “designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling” (293). Reading Coleridge, reading Eliot, reading Woolf, reveals different cures for what ails us. In these cures, Burke finds “strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off the evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another” (304).
How do you easily define a critic who deploys so many metaphors for what literature is and does? How do you sum up a critic who writes in his critical treatise Counter-Statement, “We advocate nothing, then, but a return to inconclusiveness” (91)? Simply put, you can’t. Despite being variously categorized as a New Critic, a Marxist critic, a psychoanalytic critic, Burke works beyond these tidy labels. And he means to. “The greater the range and depth of considerations about which