Equipment for Living

Kenneth Burke

Description

Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke is the largest collection of Burke's book reviews, most of them reprinted here for the first time. In these reviews, as he engages famous works of poetry, fiction, criticism, and social science from the early 20th century, Burke demonstrates the prominent methods and interests of his influential career.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 10 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602353855
• Langue: English

Extrait

Equipment for Living
The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke
Edited by
Nathaniel A. Rivers and Ryan P. Weber
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2010 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.
Equipment for living : the literary reviews of Kenneth Burke / edited by Nathaniel A. Rivers and Ryan P. Weber.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-144-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-145-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-146-2 (adobe ebook)
1. Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Literature, Modern--20th century--Reviews. 3. Literature and society. I. Rivers, Nathaniel A. II. Weber, Ryan P. III. Title.
PN770.5B87 2010
809’.03--dc22
2009052004
Cover illustration by Joseph Sellers. Used by permission.
Cover 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 paper, hardcover, and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web 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, 8 1 6 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


Contents
Preface
Introduction
Poetry
Untitled Review of Pens for Wings by Emanuel Morgan
Heaven’s First Law
Deposing the Love of the Lord
Two Kinds of Against
Recent Poetry
Return After Flight
The Hope in Tragedy
Deft Plaintiveness
Leave the Leaf Its Springtime
Tentative Proposal
Fearing’s New Poems
Literature
Alcohol in the Eighties
A Transitional Novel
Felix Kills His Author
Axiomatics
The Modern English Novel Plus
The Editing of Oneself
Modifying the Eighteenth Century
The Critic of Dostoevsky
The Consequences of Idealism
Enlarging the Narrow House
Immersion
Ethics of the Artist
Delight and Tears
The Bon Dieu of M. Jammes
A Decade of American Fiction
Permanence and Change
While Waiting
Change of Identity
Thurber Perfects Mind Cure
The Book of Proverbs
Symbolic War
Imaginary Lines
Drama
Rugged Portraiture
Field Work in Bohemia
By Ice, Fire or Decay?
Criticism of Poetry
Van Wyck Brooks in Transition?
Belief and Art
Gastronomy of Letters
Coleridge Rephrased
Cautious Enlightenment
Exceptional Improvisation
Responses to Pressure
On Poetry and Poetics
Towards Objective Criticism
Untitled Review of La Poesie et le Principe de transcendance by Maurice Duval
The Sources of “Christabel”
Toward the Perfectly Poisonous
Father and Son
Untitled Review of Wallace Stevens by Harold Bloom
Untitled Review of The Sovereign Ghost by Denis Donoghue
Prelude to Poetry: Scales and Fugue
Criticism of Literature
On Re and Dis
A New Poetics
The Technique of Listening
The Encyclopaedic, Two Kinds of
Henry Miller and Harry Levin on James Joyce, New Directions
Untitled Review of On Native Grounds by Alfred Kazin
Criticism for the Next Phase
On Covery, Re- and Dis-
The Criticism of Criticism
The Dialectics of Imagery
A Sour Note on Literary Criticism
A Trail Trails Off
Exceptional Book
The Serious Business of Comedy
Kermode Revisited
Swift Now? Swift Then
Irony Sans Rust
General Criticism
Engineering With Words
Key Words for Critics
Action, Passion, and Analogy
Likings of an Observationist
The ‘Independent Radical’
Sociology
Realism and Idealism
Idols of the Future
Hypergelasticism Exposed
The Age of Enterprise
Renaming Old Directions
Without Benefit of Politics
The Constants of Social Relativity
Untitled Review of The Ethics of Competition by Frank H. Knight
Homo Faber, Homo Magus
More Dithyrambic than Athletic
The Second Study of Middletown—Albert Rhys Williams on the U.S.S.R. and Ortega in Spain
In Quest of the Way
Protective Coloration
Storm Omens
A Radical, But—
Anatomy of the Mask
Property as an Absolute
Methodology of the Scramble
Synthetic Freedom
Spender’s Left Hand
More Probes in the Same Spot
Quantity and Quality
The ‘Science’ of Race Thinking
Corrosive Without Corrective
The Work of Regeneration
The Carrot and the Stick, or
Democracy of the Sick
Religion
Fides Quaerens Intellectum
Weighted History
Invective Against the Father
Philosophy
Righting an Ethnologic Wrong
William James: Superlative Master of the Comparative
Untitled Review of Reason and Emotion by John MacMurray
Intelligence as a Good
The Poet and the Passwords
Fraught with Freight
The Universe Alive
Liberalism’s Family Tree
George Herbert Mead
Monads—on the Make
Action as Test
History
Puritans Defended
A ‘Logic’ of History
In Vague Praise of Liberty
Untitled Review of Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man by Henri Barbusse
Revival of the Fittest
Myth
Untitled review of An Introduction to Mythology by Lewis Spence
A Recipe for Worship
Careers Without Careerism
Folktale and Myth
Myth, Method and Tragedy
Language
After-Dinner Philosophy
Idiom and Uniformity
Poets All
Concern About English
The Impartial Essence
Semantics in Demotic
Basic and After
Words as Deeds
Art
Untitled Review of Greek Vase-Painting by Ernst Buschor
Note on Der Sturm
A Pleasant View of Decay
Many Moods
The Esthetic Strain
The Esthetic Instinct
Biography
Chekhov and Three Others
Art and the Hope Chest
Heroism and Books
Codifying Milton
The Art of Yielding
A Gist of Gists of Gists
Goethe and the Jews
Mainsprings of Character
One Who Wrestled
Why Coleridge?
Cult of the Breakthrough
The ‘Christ-Dionysus Link’
Appendix A
New York Herald Tribune Books Reviews, 1923 to 1929
Appendix B: Reviews by Journal
Appendix C: Reviews in Chronological Order
Acknowledgments
Index


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,