Kenneth Duva Burke

Kenneth Duva Burke 1897-1993, American critic, b. Pittsburgh, Pa. He was music critic for The Dial (1927-29) and The Nation (1934-36). A profound thinker whose writings have influenced other critics, Burke saw literature as "symbolic action" —man must view everything through a haze of symbols (language). Among his works are Counter-Statement (1931); Attitudes Towards History (1937); A Grammar of Motives (1945); Collected Poems (1968); and The Complete White Oxen (1968), a collection of short fiction.

Burke, Kenneth [Duva] (1897–1993), literary and philosophic critic, whose books include Counter‐Statement (1931); Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1935), a philosophic investigation of the evolution of ethical ideas; Attitudes Toward History (2 vols., 1937), a psychological interpretation of historical events and characters; The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), A Grammar of Motives (1945), and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), linguistic analyses interpreting human motives; The Rhetoric of Religion (1961), further “studies in logology”; Perspectives by Incongruity (1964); Language as Symbolic Action (1966) and Dramatism and Development (1972). Towards a Better Life (1932) contains fictive “epistles and declamations”; The White Oxen (1924) prints stories; and poems are gathered in Book of Moments (1955) and Collected Poems (1968). He was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1980. The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley was published in 1988.

Burke, Kenneth (1897–1986), American literary theorist, born in Pittsburgh, educated at Ohio State University and Columbia University. He lived among artists in Greenwich Village, and acted as compositor for the first American printing of T. S. Eliot's ‘The Waste Land’. His works include Counter-Statement (1931), a literary essay; Permanence and Change (1935), a theoretical work on systems of interpretation; and The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), critical essays. His mature work on rhetoric and the psychology of human ‘motives’ embodied in language appears in A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and Language as Symbolic Action (1966, essays). Written while Burke taught part-time at Bennington College, Vermont, these are complex investigations into the workings of metaphor and other ‘master-tropes’, and propose a scheme of analysis by which formal features of texts can be understood in larger political and psychological terms. Although sometimes grouped with the New Critics, he worked to a much broader agenda which included constructive engagements with psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism.