Burke, Kenneth (Duva) 1897–: Critical Essay by Stanley Edgar Hyman

The reason reviewers and editors have had such trouble fastening on Burke's field is that he has no field, unless it be Burkology. In recent years it has become fashionable to say that he is not actually a literary critic, but a semanticist, social psychologist, or philosopher. A much more accurate statement would be that he is not only a literary critic, but a literary critic plus those things and others…. The lifelong aim of Burke's criticism has been … the unification of every discipline and body of knowledge that could throw light on literature into one consistent critical frame. Opposing every pious or conventional view that would exclude one critical tool or another as "improper," Burke has insisted: "The main ideal of criticism, as I conceive it, is to use all that is there to use." (pp. 374-75)

Burke has set out to do no less than to integrate all man's knowledge into one workable critical frame. In the course of that, he has set out to turn psychology on literature, has discovered that he would first have to synthesize one consistent psychology from the warring schools, has done it; then discovered the same need to integrate sociologies; then work both together as a social psychology; then add linguistics and semantics to the formula; still later add philosophies and theologies; finally, to turn the whole tremendous mass on a poem. His aim, as stated in the conclusion to Permanence and Change, has been "to show an integral relationship existing among a great variety of cultural manifestations which are often considered in isolation." The showiest part of Burke's work has been in the vitally necessary task of integrating Marx and Freud, or what he calls "economics" (I would prefer "sociology") and psychology. Thus he offers "a theory of the psychological processes that go with the economic ones," or proposes to unite Marx and Freud on the basic concept of "the symbols of authority," or treats Machiavelli, Hobbes, Voltaire, Bentham, Marx, and Veblen as "great formulators of economic psychoanalysis."

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