Panel Proposed by Ann George, Texas Christian University
Abstract of a Paper to Be Presented at the 1999 Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society
Panel Abstract: In the past decade, Burke scholars have begun to develop some useful resources for doing archival research in Burke's extensive papers: Paul Jay's volume of BurkeCowley correspondence indicates the wealth of material Burke left behind and makes a portion of it readily available for the first time; earlier Pre-Text articles by Lewis Baker and Charles Mann offer overviews of key collections of materials. In addition, recent studies by Wess and Selzer demonstrate how primary materials can illuminate Burke's life and texts. These three presentations -- all of which capitalize on primary research in Burke's personal papers -- suggest how much provocative material remains to be studied. They describe unknown or little explored archival materials and illustrate how archival research can heighten scholars' ability to engage the always-engaging Kenneth Burke.
Speaker 1: Jack Selzer, Penn State University
"Engaging
Kenneth Burke: A Report from the Archives"
This presentation will provide a general overview of the panel by discussing the range of Burke archives available (including several that are not widely known), how those archives can support a variety of research programs, and how to negotiate the details involved in archival research.
I will then seek to demonstrate the value of archival research by presenting examples of the new information, insights, and Burkean texts uncovered through extensive research in Burke's papers at a number of important libraries (including those at Penn State, Yale, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, Stanford, Syracuse, Columbia, and the Newberry and New York Public Libraries). This primary research reveals what is almost impossible to believe: that Burke was even more prolific, more versatile,, and more engaged than scholars had previously imagined. New finds include a 1930s political cartoon in New Masses; anonymous satires by Burke and mock letters to editors; reviews by Burke unrecorded in current bibliographies; longer versions of well-known publications that bad to be cut for publication (for instance, "Twelve Propositions," the famous response to Margaret Schlauch's review of Attitudes Toward History verse by Burke, and an unpublished short essay on Wyndham Lewis.
Primary research. in Burke's papers offers scholars often remarkable insight into Burke's habits, his thinking and writing, and his constant engagement with other writers and other texts.
Speaker
2: Ann George, Texas Christian University
"The Southern Review Files: Burke and Attitudes Toward History"
Current scholarship often casts Burke as a loner, misunderstood and dismissed by his contemporaries as an elusive or irrelevant visionary, politically and aesthetically out of step, too hard to peg or just too hard. There is no doubt that many of Burke's contemporaries -- even some of his friends -- often saw him that way. But it is also true that Burke was a writer deeply engaged in the critical and political debates of his time, one whose work, if not widely embraced was nonetheless widely recognized as demanding serious response. Archival research is vital in helping us document this exchange -- the ways in which Burke's work emerged from and responded to cultural conversation.
My presentation, which relies on material from The Southern Review files at Yale's Beinecke Library, is designed to deepen our understanding of Burke's interaction with key writers and critical groups in the 1930s. It examines correspondence between Burke and the magazine's editors, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, as well as an unpublished, uncataloged essay by Burke entitled "On 'Must' and 'Take Care.'" The editorial correspondence reveals how Burke was courted by Warren and Brooks, and it details his developing relationship with The Southern Review -- a relationship which culminated in the publication of The Philosophy of Literary Form by LSU Press in 1941.
"On 'Must'and Take Care' " is Burke's response to a long, critical review of Attitudes Toward History by Henry Bamford Parkes published in The Southern Review in 1938. Burke, who was always eager to refute his reviewers, submitted the essay to Warren and Brooks but withdrew it from consideration before they had reached a decision, claiming that he did not wish to monopolize the pages of the Review. "On 'Must' and 'Take Care' " stands as an important companion piece to Burke's other, well-known defense of Attitudes, "Twelve Propositions on the Relation Between Economics and Psychology," which Bu wrote in response to Margaret Schlauch's review in Science and Society and which was reprinted in The Philosophy of Literary Form. Taken together, these two defenses allow us to explore the reception of Burke's work by both radical and conservative writers as well as Burke's struggles to position himself among competing political and philosophical factions.
Speaker 3: Miriam Marty Clark, Auburn University
"Dear Fren and
Infloonce Person": Burke and Nemerov in the 1950s
For more than forty years, from the late 1940s through the 1980s, Burke corresponded with the poet Howard Nemerov. Their letters, as many as two or three a week during some periods, document Burke's profound influence on Nemerov's development as a poet and critic and Nemerov's more subtle but nevertheless significant influence on Burke's thought in The Rhetoric of Religion, Language as Symbolic Action, and other late writings.
This paper considers the Burke-Nemerov correspondence of the 1950s. During this period their long conversation is established in the letters and their extraordinary similarities -- common sources and subjects, shared habits of mind and modes of being -- are discovered on both sides. During the fifties, Burke abandons or reconfigures the last volume of the envisioned trilogy and moves into the final phase of his career with the development of logology; at the same time Nemerov moves toward full maturity as a poet and toward the important poems of his midcareer. The letters track both developments; in revealing the affinities, friendship, and the sustained dialogue between the two men, they also reveal the bases for Nemerov's brilliant verse engagement of Burke's thought.
The recurrent subjects of these letters are themselves telling: the "thinking of the body" (extending at times to their own numerous, extensively recounted, and energetically diagnosed symptoms) and the relation of body to mind; relations among orders -- natural, social, verbal, and supernatural; the origins and operations of language. The letters are filled with, and deeply occupied by, linguistic play -- puns, turns, doublings, inversions, tautologies, clusters of sounds or images -- drawing always on the larger play of the mind in the world. From time to time Burke offers penetrating commentary (formal or informal) on Nemerov's poems as he had done with Roethke, Williams, and Moore. The most sustained example of this is his "Comments on Eighteen Poems," published in the Kenyon Review in the mid-1950s.
The paper I propose will be in part broadly descriptive of this first full decade of the BurkeNemerov correspondence and of where it most illuminates Burke's middle and late work. In the second half of the paper I will consider in more particular ways some passages related to creation and beginning, the negative, and the cycle of terms for order, in short, how the letters trace the development of logology and some parallel developments (themselves noteworthy) in Nemerov's poems.
Return to the 1999 KB Conference Program
 |
|