Kenneth Burke

Kenneth Duva Burke ( born May 5, 1897 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, † November 19, 1993 in Andover ) was an American author, literary and communication theorists.

Life

Burke begins his academic life with a study at Ohio State University. In the student years already falls first poetry and short stories that he may publish in the issued by his school friend James Light magazine sans-culotte. 1918 Burke breaks from his studies to integrate into the New York artist bohemian Greenwich Village, where he also gets to know William Carlos Williams, among many others. 1920-1925 he published more short stories, reviews and translations, especially in The Dial for setting up the newspaper in 1929. Between 1922 and 1936 he worked as a music critic for the magazine The Nation. From 1937, he received a number of teaching positions at several American universities, including the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago. In 1943 he receives a permanent position at Bennington College, which he will hold until 1961. In 1949 he was offered a teaching job in Princeton, finally in 1967 at Harvard. Kenneth Burke dies on 19 November 1993 on his farm in Andover due to heart failure.

Theory

The total theoretical work Burkes revolves around the concept of social interaction. Burke understands literature as symbolic action in which an individual can realize certain human universals socially. Symbol means here, deviating from the usual definition, a formal representation of action, such as dreams, utopias and the like. Central to this is the concept of rhetoric, which is understood as a special form of symbolic interaction, in which an individual is trying to animate a collective for joint action by deceives an identity of rhetorical speaker and audience -influenced. Strongly influenced by Freud, Mead, Marx, Nietzsche, and Veblen, Burke is looking for the original " drama" in which such rhetorical structures can express, for example, as conflicts, as cooperation, as identification.

Burke does not separate here between literature and reality: in his view, our social life itself is dramatically structured, and can therefore be understood as a literary work; as well as literary works are social structures. With the five terms of the Act (Act), the scene ( Scene ), the agents ( Agency), the agent (agent) and the intent ( purpose ) Burke tries to provide a vocabulary with which each symbolic action principle shall be " dramatic" leaves. Understanding social drama can help us to defuse conflicts, as they represent, for example, in capitalism, which is characterized by Burke from the fact that people not handle symbols, but are themselves manipulated by symbols. The most commonly treated texts by Burke include Coleridge's poems.

Burke was also active as a novelist: The White Oxen (1924 ) is a collection of short stories. The experimental novel Towards a Better Life has falls prey to the form of prayers or recitations of an isolated society of man, the increasingly mental degeneration.

Student

Armin Paul Frank (Emeritus University of Göttingen)

Works

  • Counter- statement. London 1968 -. Attempt to understand literary structures as timeless universals that are expressed per individual authors. Most important method here is the analysis of topoi, rhetorical commonplaces.
  • Permanence and Change (1935 ) - Deals with the historical relativity of ethics.
  • Attitudes Toward History ( 1937) - How do historical events as a mental beat down events in individuals?
  • Philosophy of Literary form New York, 1941 -. Burke's major theoretical work discovered all verbal actions as symbolic forms that are used in " rituals " strategies mentioned by the author their realization. A symbol is the transformation of an own psychic conflict in one of the three main symbolic forms of " design ", " prayer " and " Dream". Burke reminded again and again to Freud's theory of the " common daydream ".
  • The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" (1941, German 1971). Approaching the method of discourse analysis Burke shows Hitler's example, that in a concrete text -immanent and external influences can not be separated. Hitler's diatribe is also a - albeit distorted - image of a social context and calls on rhetorical strategies actions to deal with this context.
  • The trilogy A Grammar of Motives (1945 ), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) and Language as Symbolic Action (1966 ) builds theses from the Philosophy continues. Central is the recognition that human social behavior can be interpreted as literature rhetorically. Burke tried this a fusion of psychoanalysis and Marxism.
  • The Complete White Oxen. Collected Short Fiction. Berkeley 1968
  • Counter- statement. London 1968
  • The Philosophy of Literary form. New York 1941
  • A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley 1969
  • A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley 1969
  • Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley 1966
  • On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows, 1967-1984. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003.
  • The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Mein Kampf". Frankfurt 1967
  • Poetry as symbolic action. A theory of literature. Frankfurt am Main in 1966.
Andover (New Jersey) Scene (drama) Literary topos Hayden White Name Authority File
471763
de