| Kenneth Burke and the Conversation After Philosophy Contributor(s): Crusius, Timothy W. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0809322072 ISBN-13: 9780809322077 Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press OUR PRICE: $38.61 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: March 1999 Annotation: Throughout much of his long life (1897--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, from "Counter-Statement" (1931) through "The 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 from "A Grammar of Motives" (1945) up to his last published essays, drawing most heavily on "A 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 philosophy--his concern with interpretation, with dialectic and dialogue, with a "praxis" devoted to awareness and control of the self-deceiving and potentially self-destructive motives inherent in language itself.
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| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Language Arts & Disciplines | Rhetoric - Language Arts & Disciplines | Linguistics - General - Philosophy | History & Surveys - Modern |
| Dewey: 191 |
| LCCN: 98-21997 |
| Series: Rhetorical Philosophy and Theory |
| Physical Information: 0.72" H x 5.98" W x 8.9" (0.95 lbs) 272 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This study of Kenneth Burke's writings traces the critic's commitment and contribution to philosophy prior to 1945. The author contends that rather than belonging to the late-modernist tradition, Burke actually starts from a position closely akin to such postmodern figures as Michel Foucault. |
