Kenneth (Duva) Burke Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Kenneth (Duva) Burke

It would be misleading to label the work of Kenneth Burke "literary criticism," for his concerns extend far beyond the confines of that discipline. Burke is the most theoretically challenging, unorthodox, and sophisticated of twentieth-century speculators on literature and culture, a surprising feat in light of his irregular career. Without a college degree, with minimal formal training in literature, philosophy, psychology, or political science, with no permanent full-time academic appointment, and with no conventional area of specialization, Burke has worked for over sixty-four years in rural New Jersey producing a body of work whose breadth, rigor, and theoretical grounding is unmatched by the work of any other American critic. Novelist, poet, translator, and philosopher, Burke is first and foremost a critic in the broadest sense of the word. Indeed his work starts from the recognition that "all living things are critics." Humans have a metacritical capacity that separates them from other organisms, for, as Burke wrote in Permanence and Change (1935), "though all organisms are critics in the sense that they interpret the signs about them, the experimental, speculative technique made available by speech would seem to single out the human species as the only one possessing an equipment for going beyond the criticism of experience to a criticism of criticism.

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