Language As Symbolic Action

Essays on Life, Literature, and Method

Kenneth Burke

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520001923
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520340664
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

From the Preface: The title for this collection was the title of a course in literary criticism that I gave for many years at Bennington College. And much of the material presented here was used in that course. The title should serve well to convey the gist of these various pieces. For all of them are explicitly concerned with the attempt to define and track down the implications of the term "symbolic action, " and to show how the marvels of literature and language look when considered form that point of view.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Contents
• PART I: FIVE SUMMARIZING ESSAYS
• Note
• Chapter One — Definition of Man
• Chapter Two — Poetics in Particular, Language in General
• Chapter Three — Terministic Screens
• Chapter Four — Mind, Body and the Unconscious
• Chapter Five — Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction
• PART II: PARTICULAR WORKS AND AUTHORS
• Chapter One — Shakespearean Persuasion: Antony and Cleopatra
• Chapter Two — Timon of Athens and Misanthropic Gold
• Chapter Three — Form and Persecution in the Oresteia
• Chapter Four — Goethe's Faust, Part I
• Chapter Five — Faust II—The Ideas Behind the Image
• Chapter Six — I, Eye, Ay—Concerning Emerson's Early Essay on "Nature" and the Machinery of Transcendence
• Chapter Seven — "Kubla Khan," Proto-Surrealist Poem
• Chapter Seven —Social and Cosmic Mystery: A Passage to India
• Chapter Nine- Version, Con-, Per-, and In- Thoughts on Djuna Barnes's Novel Nightwood
• Chapter Ten — The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke
• Chapter Eleven — William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963
• PART III: FURTHER ESSAYS ON SYMBOLISM IN GENERAL
• Note
• Chapter One — Rhetoric and Poetics
• Chapter Two — The Thinking of the Body (Comments on the Imagery of Catharsis in Literature)
• Chapter Three — Somnia ad Urinandum: More Thoughts on Motion and Action
• Chapter Four — What Are the Signs of What? (A Theory of "Entitlement")
• Chapter Five — Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy
• Chapter Six — Medium as "Message"
• Chapter Seven — A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language
• Chapter Eight — Formalist Criticism: Its Principles and Limits
• Index