Kenneth Burke and the Conversation After Philosophy

by Crusius, Timothy W.

• ISBN13: 9780809322077
• ISBN10: 0809322072
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-03-01
• Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ Pr

Summary

Throughout much of his long life (1897shy;1993), Kenneth Burke was recognized as a leading American intellectual, perhaps the most significant critic writing in English since Coleridge. From about 1950 on, rhetoricians in both English and speech began to see him as a major contributor to the New Rhetoric. But despite Burke's own claims to be writing philosophy and some notice from reviewers and critics that his work was philosophically significant, Timothy W. Crusius is the first to access his work as philosophy. Crusius traces Burke's commitment and contributions to philosophy prior to 1945, fromCounter-Statement(1931) throughThe Philosophy of Literary Form(1941). While Burke might have been a late modernist thinker, Crusius shows that Burke actually starts from a position closely akin to such postmodern figures as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. Crusius then examines Burke's work fromA Grammar of Motives(1945) up to his last published essays, drawing most heavily onA Rhetoric of Motives,The Rhetoric of Religion, and uncollected essays from the 1970s. This part concerns Burke's contributions to human activities always closely associated with rhetoric-hermeneutics, dialectic, and praxis. Burke's highly developed notion of our species as the "symbol-using animal," argues Crusius, draws together the various strands of his later philosophyhis concern with interpretation, with dialectic and dialogue, with apraxisdevoted to awareness and control of the self-deceiving and potentially self-destructive motives inherent in language itself.

Author Biography

Timothy W. Crusius is an associate professor of English at Southern Methodist University. His books include Discourse: A Critique and Synthesis of Major Theories, A Teacher's Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, and The Aims of Argument: A Rhetoric and Reader (with Carolyn Channell).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix	(2)
List of Abbreviations of Burke's Works	xi
Introduction: The Question of Kenneth Burke's Philosophy	1	(22)
Part One. From "Poststructuralism" to Dramatism: The Early Philosophy	23	(96)
1. Skeptikos: The Postphilosophical Phase	23	(11)
2. PostPhilosophical Themes: On Identity, Reason, and Figurative Language	34	(31)
3. PostPhilosophical Turns: To Language, Society, and Rhetoric	65	(27)
4. Being Without Metaphysics	92	(27)
Part Two. Four Essays on the Later Philosophy	119	(109)
5. On Discounting, Terministic Screens, and Dramatism	119	(22)
6. "Humility Without Humiliation": The Philosophical Anthropology	141	(34)
7. Dialectics Within the Dialogue	175	(23)
8. Toward "Complete Sophistication": The Praxis of Comedy, Logology, and Ecology	198	(30)
Conclusion: Who Do You Say That I Am? Burke's PostPhilosophical Identity	228	(7)
Works Cited	235	(8)
Index	243