Blackwell Reference Online

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What are they worrying about? Didn't we explain that we have no warlike intentions?Kenneth BurkeOver the course of an incredibly long and productive career, Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) examined the ways of that most complex of all species: the “symbol-using, symbol mis-using animal” (Burke 1966). His trackings of terminologies – of the ways we humans use and are used by them – took him from language and literature through all of “human relations” to philosophy, religion, and words about words. His genius consisted in virtuoso readings, critical pathfindings, and theoretical breakthroughs, but his own words about words display a “stable instability” (Leff 1989).More “convolutionist” than revolutionist, Burke was as apt to treat a pun seriously as a piety mockingly. Worse yet, to many readers, he seemed to delight in what he himself called “gratuitous asides,” “benign casuistries,” “felicitous distortions,” “perspectives by incongruity.” For Burke's critics, these alleged misuses of language and logic are proof positive of the ultimate vacuousness of his philosophy. But for many of his defenders, Burke's comedic style – his puns and twists and extensions and asides – are indispensable components of an ironic, often self-ironic, comedic method. His lifelong friend Malcolm Cowley's explanation, not entirely inconsistent with the other two, was that the man simply couldn't help it (Jay ... log in or subscribe to read full text