Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
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Parlor Press books by Kenneth Burke
Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959–1987, edited by William H. Rueckert (2003)
Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, edited by Scott L. Newstok (2006)
Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955, edited by William H. Rueckert (2007)
Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke, edited by Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber (2007)
Parlor Press books authored by William H. Rueckert
Faulkner from Within: Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William Faulkner (2004)
Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955
Kenneth Burke
Selected, Arranged, and Edited by
William H. Rueckert
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com
Parlor Press LLC, 816 Robinson Street, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
Permission to reprint selections in this volume are acknowledged in the chapters themselves. For their support of this project, we are grateful to The Kenneth Burke Literary Trust, the Chicago Review, the Hudson Review, the National Society for the Study of Education, the Sewanee Review, and Mrs. Eva Hindus.
© 2007 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
Burke, Kenneth, 1897–1993.
Essays toward a symbolic of motives, 1950–1955 / Kenneth Burke ; selected, arranged and edited by William H. Rueckert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–932559–34–5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1–932559–35–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1–932559–36–1 (adobe ebk.)
1. Symbolism in literature. 2. Literary form. I. Rueckert, William H. (William Howe), 1926– II. Title.
PN56.S9B87 2006
809’.912--dc22
2006034891
Cover and book 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 paperback, cloth, and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the Internet 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].
For David Blakesley and Barbara Rueckert,
Dedicated Burkeans
—WHR
Contents
Part 1: Some Basic Requirements for a Dramatistic Poetic
A “Dramatistic” View of “Imitation”
The Language of Poetry, “Dramatistically” Considered
Fact, Inference, and Proof in the Analysis of Literary Symbolism
Part 2: Dramatistic Analyses of Individual Texts and Authors
Ethan Brand: A Preparatory Investigation,
Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method1
The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke
Policy Made Personal: Whitman’s Verse and Prose-Salient Traits
Part 3: By and Through Language, Beyond Language
Preface
The purpose of this collection is to finally make available in a single volume the essential texts, some long out of print and hard to come by, some never published, from Burke’s earliest version of A Symbolic of Motives. Some of the texts included here have been readily available in Language as Symbolic Action—such as the “Goethe’s Faust, Part I” essay—but others have not, and they include most of the rest of the material in this collection. I have briefly discussed all of these selections in the Introduction, “Versions of A Symbolic of Motives.”
I am a big believer in the power of books, of having things readily available in a single volume one can take off the shelf and study over and over again. I have known most of the essays for a long time, but it has always been my ambition to have them in a single book on the shelf next to Burke’s other books. Thanks to David Blakesley, Parlor Press, and my wife Barbara, I have finally realized that ambition in this, my last, Burke project.
William H. Rueckert
Fairport, NY
January, 2003
Introduction
We know of at least three versions of A Symbolic of Motives: there is the one that I have assembled here, which is now called Essays Toward A Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. It consists of selected essays from among those Burke wrote and published between 1950 and 1955, which he clearly indicated were to be part of A Symbolic of Motives, as he originally conceived it. He has left us various lists indicating which of these essays were to be part of A Symbolic of Motives. The most complete list1 can be found at the end of his essay, “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education” (1955). I have included selections from that essay in this collection, as well as the list of items Burke added in a footnote at the end of the essay. The second version of A Symbolic of Motives is called Poetics, Dramatistically Considered, which Burke wrote and assembled from published and unpublished material from 1957 to 1958, during the