Кеннет Бёрк: Жизнь и творчество американского мыслителя

American philosopher and literary critic (1897–1993)the Irish hurler

Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one of the first individuals to stray from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as "symbolic action." Burke was unorthodox, concerning himself not only with literary texts, but also with the elements of the text that interacted with the audience: social, historical, political background, author biography, etc. For his career, Burke has been praised by The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism as "one of the most unorthodox, challenging, theoretically sophisticated American born literary critics of the twentieth century." His work continues to be discussed by rhetoricians and philosophers.

Kenneth Duva Burke was born on May 5, 1897 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Peabody High School, where he befriended classmates Malcolm Cowley and James Light. He attended Ohio State University to pursue courses in French, German, Greek, and Latin. He moved with his parents to Weehawken, New Jersey and later he enrolled at Columbia University. During his time there, he was a member of the Boar's Head Society. The constraining learning environment, however, impelled Burke to leave Columbia, never receiving a college diploma. In Greenwich Village, he kept company with avant garde writers such as Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, Gorham Munson, and later Allen Tate. Raised by a Christian Science mother, Burke later became an avowed agnostic. In 1919, he married Lily Mary Batterham, with whom he had three daughters: the late feminist, Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987); musician (Jeanne) Elspeth Chapin Hart (1920 2015); and writer and poet France Burke (born c. 1925). He later divorced Lily and, in 1933, married her sister Elizabeth Batterham, with whom he had two sons, Michael and Anthony. Burke served as the editor of the modernist literary magazine The Dial in 1923, and as its music critic from 1927 to 1929. Kenneth himself was an avid player of the piano. He received the Dial Award in 1928 for distinguished service to American literature. He was the music critic of The Nation from 1934 to 1936, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935. His work on criticism was a driving force for placing him back into the university spotlight. As a result, he was able to teach and lecture at various colleges, including Bennington College, while continuing his literary work. Many of Burke's personal papers and correspondence are housed at Pennsylvania State University's Special Collections Library. However, despite his stint lecturing at universities, Burke was an autodidact and a self taught scholar. In later life, his New Jersey farm was a popular summer retreat for his extended family, as reported by his grandson Harry Chapin, a popular singer songwriter. Burke died of heart failure at his home in Andover, New Jersey, age 96.

Burke, like many twentieth century theorists and critics, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a lifelong interpreter of Shakespeare and was also significantly influenced by Thorstein Veblen. He resisted being pigeonholed as a follower of any philosophical or political school of thought, and had a notable and very public break with the Marxists who dominated the literary criticism set in the 1930s. Burke corresponded with a number of literary critics, thinkers, and writers over the years, including William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore. Later thinkers who have acknowledged Burke's influence include Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, J. Hillis Miller, Susan Sontag (his student at the University of Chicago), Erving Goffman, Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, René Girard, Fredric Jameson, Michael Calvin McGee, Dell Hymes and Clifford Geertz. Burke was one of the first prominent American critics to appreciate and articulate the importance of Thomas Mann and André Gide; Burke produced the first English translation of "Death in Venice", which first appeared in The Dial in 1924. It is now considered to be much more faithful and explicit than H. T. Lowe Porter's more famous 1930 translation. Burke's political engagement is evident—A Grammar of Motives takes as its epigraph, ad bellum purificandum (toward the purification of war). American literary critic Harold Bloom singled out Burke's Counterstatement and A Rhetoric of Motives for inclusion in his book The Western Canon. Beyond his contemporary influences, Burke took Aristotle's teachings into account while developing his theories on rhetoric. A significant source of his ideas is Aristotle's Rhetoric. Drawing from this work, Burke oriented his writing about language specifically to its social context. Similarly, he studied language as involving more than logical discourse and grammatical structure because he recognized that the social context of language cannot be reduced to principles of pure reason. Burke draws a line between a Platonic and a more contemporary view of rhetoric, described as "old rhetoric" and "new rhetoric" respectively. The former is defined by persuasion by any means, while the latter is concerned with "identification." In Burke's use of the word identification he is describing the process by which the speaker associates herself/himself with certain groups, such as a target audience. His idea of "identification" is similar to ethos of classical rhetoric, but it also explains the use of logos and pathos in an effort to create a lasting impression on the auditors. It is characterized by "identifying" with a speaker's rhetoric insofar as their words represent a world that seems to be that in which we live. This theory differs from ethos most significantly in Burke's conception of artistic communication that he believes is defined by eloquence, which is "simply the end of art and therefore its essence." The use of rhetoric conveys aesthetic and social competence which is why a text can rarely be reduced to purely scientific or political implications, according to Burke. Rhetoric forms our social identity by a series of events usually based on linguistics, but more generally by the use of any symbolic figures. He uses the metaphor of a drama to articulate this point, where interdependent characters speak and communicate with each other while allowing the others to do the same. Also, Burke describes identification as a function of persuasive appeal. Burke defined rhetoric as the "use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents." His definition builds on the preexisting ideas of how people understand the meaning of rhetoric. Burke describes rhetoric as using words to move people or encourage action. Furthermore, he described rhetoric as being almost synonymous with persuasion (A Rhetoric of Motives, 1950). Burke argued that rhetoric works to bring about change in people. This change can be evident through attitude, motives or intentions as Burke stated but it can also be physical. Calling for help is an act of rhetoric. Rhetoric is symbolic action that calls people to physical action. Ultimately, rhetoric and persuasion become interchangeable words according to Burke. Other scholars have similar definitions of rhetoric. Aristotle argued that rhetoric was a tool for persuading people (but also for gaining information). He stated that rhetoric had the power to persuade people if the speaker knew how. One way in which Aristotle formed his arguments was through syllogism. Another example of how rhetoric was used to persuade was deliberative discourse. Here, politicians and lawyers used speech to pass or reject policies. Sally Gearhart states that rhetoric uses persuasion to induce change. Although she argues that persuasion is violent and harmful, she uses it as a tool herself to bring about change.

The political and social power of symbols was central to Burke's scholarship throughout his career. He felt that through understanding "what is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it", we could gain insight into the cognitive basis for our perception of the world. For Burke, the way in which we decide to narrate gives importance to specific qualities over others. He believed that this could tell us a great deal about how we see the world.

Burke called the social and political rhetorical analysis "dramatism" and believed that such an approach to language analysis and language usage could help us understand the basis of conflict, the virtues and dangers of cooperation, and the opportunities of identification and consubstantiality. Burke defined the rhetorical function of language as "a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." His definition of humanity states that "man" is "the symbol using, making, and mis using animal, inventor of the negative, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, and rotten with perfection." For Burke, some of the most significant problems in human behavior resulted from instances of symbols using human beings rather than human beings using symbols. Burke proposed that when we attribute motives to others, we tend to rely on ratios between five elements: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. This has become known as the dramatistic pentad. The pentad is grounded in his dramatistic method, which considers human communication as a form of action. Dramatism "invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action" (Grammar of Motives, xxii). Burke pursued literary criticism not as a formalistic enterprise but rather as an enterprise with significant sociological impact; he saw literature as "equipment for living," offering folk wisdom and common sense to people and thus guiding the way they lived their lives.

Another key concept for Burke is the Terministic screen—a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us. Here Burke offers rhetorical theorists and critics a way of understanding the relationship between language and ideology. Language, Burke thought, doesn't simply "reflect" reality; it also helps select reality as well as deflect reality. In Language as Symbolic Action (1966), he writes, "Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent must function also as a deflection of reality. Burke describes terministic screens as reflections of reality—we see these symbols as things that direct our attention to the topic at hand. For example, photos of the same object with different filters each direct the viewer's attention differently, much like how different subjects in academia grab the attention differently. Burke states, "We must use terministic screens, since we can't say anything without the use of terms; whatever terms we use, they necessarily constitute a corresponding kind of screen; and any such screen necessarily directs the attention to one field rather than another." Burke drew not only from the works of Shakespeare and Sophocles, but from films and radio that were important to pop culture, because they were teeming with "symbolic and rhetorical ingredients." We as a people can be cued to accept the screen put in front of us, and mass culture such as TV and websites can be to blame for this. Media today has altered terministic screens, or as Richard Toye wrote in his book Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction, the "linguistic filters which cause us to see situations in particular fashions."

Burke viewed identification as a critical element of persuasion. According to Burke, as we listen to someone speak, we gauge how similar that person is to us. If our opinions match those of the speaker, we identify with the speaker's rhetoric— therefore identifying with the speaker. Based on how much we identify with the speaker, we may be moved to accept the conclusions that the speaker comes to in an argument, as well as all (or most) of its implications. In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke not only explores self identification within a rhetorical context, but also analyzes exterior identification, such as identifying with objects and concepts that are not the self. There are several other facets to identification that Burke discusses within his books, such as consubstantiality, property, autonomy, and cunning. Burke's exploration of identification within rhetoric heavily influenced modern rhetorical theory. He revolutionized rhetoric in the West with his exploration of identification, arguing that rhetoric is not only about "rational argument plus emotion", but also that it involves people connecting to language and one another at the same time.

Burke was awarded the National Medal for Literature at the American Book Awards in 1981. According to The New York Times, April 20, 1981, "The $15,000 award, endowed in memory of the late Harold Guinzberg, founder of the Viking Press, honors a living American writer 'for a distinguished and continuing contribution to American letters.'"