Jameson, Burke, and the Virus of Suggestion: Between Ideology and Rhetoric

Abstract

Motivated by Wayne C. Booth’s notion of “methodological pluralism,” this essay compares Fredric Jameson and Kenneth Burke’s writings on Henry James in order to shed new light on disagreements voiced by these theorists in a 1978 exchange from Critical Inquiry . The essay builds on Burke’s brief commentary on James’s The Spoils of Poynton , as well as Jameson’s scattered writings on James’s psychologized modernism, to demonstrate how Spoils reflects the incongruous but finally complementary positions of Jameson the historical ideologist and Burke the rhetorician.