What's in a Name? Twentieth-Century Realism in Kenneth Burke's Aesthetics

Abstract

Admired throughout the twentieth century by literary and sociological theorists but long neglected by philosophers, readers have overlooked Kenneth Burke's theoretical dependence on American philosophic realism, thus missing consistent patterns of his insight. By tracing Burke's own realism back to his year at Columbia University and his time atThe Dialmagazine, we see how Burke's earliest aesthetic theories conformed to aspects of the new realist movement. During the Depression, in his bookPermanence and Change, he followed earlier new realists in arguing for a reconstructed modern teleology of “purpose” and incorporated realism within his pleas for a suppler Communist Party rhetoric than that sanctioned by the party leadership. Burke's apparently inconsistent positions can be understood as a continuous philosophical argument for realism within changing intellectual contexts, explaining his long-lived cross-disciplinary appeal and influence. Burke maintained central realistic tenets: (1) the independent existence and intelligibility of an external world and (2) the substantive meaning of universals, particularly a common human nature. Examining these connections informs our readings of Burke while illuminating one reverberation of the philosophical “new realists” in American intellectual culture. Burke expressed realist principles in his presentation of symbolic action and dramatism inThe Philosophy of Literary FormandA Grammar of Motives, both published in the 1940s. His sophisticated aesthetic–linguistic realism appeared in his arguments against logical empiricists and New Critics, which displayed an arc of transformation in the philosophical and critical culture before World War II from a still-contested mixture to an emphatically nominalistic, antirealist one. It was from this philosophical position that Burke offered his lively, penetrating analyses of and challenges to many of the major movements in twentieth-century philosophy: realism, pragmatism, positivism, and post-structuralism.