Within Burkeology, it is difficult to see Burke as a literary critic when he is more famous for his social and cultural criticism at large. Books such as Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, and A Rhetoric of Motives use literature primarily to explore the drama of human interaction played out in language. This exploration, however, evidences the crossing of traditional genres present throughout Burke. William H. Rueckert testifies to this approach in charting the labeling of Burke’s work:
At first we thought of him as a literary critic (a role that is continuous throughout his career); then we thought of him as a social/cultural critic (another role that is continuous); then we thought of him as a language critic (not a linguist, but a critic who approached the study of human relations through the study of language). (100)
Rueckert here captures the dynamic relationship between the social, the cultural, the linguistic, and the literary as Burke envisioned them. Dennis J. Ciesielski argues that Burke’s criticism “reveals and investigates the social textuality” in a way that juxtaposes the “cultural, historical, and linguistic” forces at work in everyday life. It is the “multiplicity of these discourse situations which validates Burke’s investigative forays” into what Ciesielski calls “world-text” (243). If literature is equipment for living, then literary criticism is always already social, cultural, and linguistic criticism. As Rueckert parenthetically argues above, these roles are continuous; we would argue that, more importantly, they are all coterminous.
As Rueckert’s statement implies, Burke began his career as a literary critic, publishing reviews in the “little magazines” and scholarly publications of the 1920s and 1930s. But with these literary reviews, Burke began to chart his career as a social and cultural critic as well. Many of these reviews were short, only a page or a column in the review section, but they were remarkable grapplings with the diverse fields of the day, including: literature, poetry, criticism, sociology, philosophy and language. As Burke tackles a work, he masterfully engages its ideas in ways that elaborate dynamic dimensions of the other’s thoughts and his own. His reviews contributed to the valuable discourse in magazines such as The New Masses, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, and especially The Dial. Many of these magazines had a huge impact on the artistic and critical circles of their day, drawing in literary giants like William Carlos Williams, W.B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, and e.e. cummings.
Though most of Burke’s book reviews are not as available as his widely printed works, thinkers across the humanities have lauded Burke’s abilities as a reader and critic. W. H. Auden praised Burke’s magnitude in 1941: “No isolated quotation can do justice to Mr. Burke’s subtlety and good sense, and no doubts that one may entertain about the soundness of his critical position can obscure the fact that he is unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America” (59). Rueckert, who calls Burke the “omnivorous critic at large” (46), echoes Auden by asserting that “Burke is unquestionably one of our great modern critics” (100). Recent critics also cite Burke as an influence; most famously, Harold Bloom called Burke “the strongest living representative of the American critical tradition, and perhaps the largest single source of that tradition since its founder, Ralph Waldo Emerson” (qtd. in Kostelanetz 11)
These critics praise Burke for analyzing the symbolic action of language within literature to reveal how it is not just a reflection but an interpretation of reality. As Burke writes in the review “The Quest for Certainty,” (1930), “a shift in the vocabulary of approach will entail new classifications for the same events." Burke calls these shifts terministic screens, because, like color filters on a camera, vocabularies work as a selection and deflection of reality and are thus an active interpretation that prescribes further action. Literature then becomes the naming of recurrent situations as a means of coping with them. The critic’s job is to identify the use and usefulness of these namings, to interpret the interpretation. This leads to Jay’s conclusion that literature and literary criticism are both equipment for living. Jay writes, “I think it is important to recognize, too, that criticism—and the criticism of criticism—is also treated by Burke as a broadly social act by which we equip and re-equip ourselves to live” (“Criticism” 29). If this critical program is performed well, it can transform literature into salvation. Rhetorician Wayne Booth writes, “[Burke] would use criticism to save the world, including the world of criticism, and he would also see literature itself as one mode that can save or damn us” (9). By posting warning signs and helpful instructions, critics help readers maximize the strategic value of a text. As Rueckert writes, critical texts are themselves equipment for living:
Criticism also functions as part of our equipment for living—it’s something that it most certainly did for Burke during his long and varied critical life. Critics are mediators between the symbolic structures and us readers; they share their knowledge with us, not because they think we are stupid, but because they see things in these texts that we don’t and they are convinced that their knowledge will be useful to us. (114)
If critics look for things that the rest of us don’t see, they better look in all the places we never imagined. Burke’s reviews, as well as his wildly annotated personal library, evidence an uncanny reading ability, reflecting his view in the essay “Kinds of Criticism” that “At [criticism’s] best, it sustains the intense contemplation of an object to the point where one begins to see not only more deeply into the subject but beyond it” (276). Richard Kostelanetz describes Burke’s copy of Harold Bloom’s Wallace Stevens, which demonstrates Burke’s vigilant notetaking and marginalia in anticipation of a review in The New Republic in 1977 (“Untitled Review of Harold Bloom”):
On every page are perhaps 20 inked annotations. Key words are underlined, vertical lines trace connections. In the blank pages of the back of the book and even on the flyleaves are more extensive notes, some of them referring to the book in general and others to particular passages. This is the kind of critical artifact that should be on permanent display in every university library. (25)
Because of his complexity as a reader, Burke’s criticism transcends any specific school or structure. Limiting reading to formalized critical conventions risks deflecting alternate avenues of salvation and tumbling headlong into damnation. To this end, Burke is, as Charles Glicksberg writes, “A subtle and adventurous critic . . . willing to follow the trail of an idea wherever it may lead, without regard to the established sanctities of meaning” (74).
This tendency for intense contemplation, while beneficial and productive, can frustrate even the most generous of readers. Burke’s dogged, even playful, explorations of specific textual elements may appear tangential. Wendell Harris comments:
Burke creates difficulties for his readers. Much of what seems unnecessarily eccentric in his writing results from a tendency to elaborate as far as possible a limited number of ideas that strongly appeal to him . . . until they swallow everything in sight. Moreover Burke frequently seems to be writing only to himself. (453)
A first glance through these reviews could produce sympathy for Harris’s critique; Burke may seem at times to write largely for his own amusement. Indeed, he almost apologizes in the review “Engineering With Words” (1923) for pursuing Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays by means of a circuitous discussion of Milton.
Ultimately, though, the charge of digression is too extreme even for a man who adheres to no strict critical approach. These supposed digressions are better understood as Burke’s desire to incorporate everything available to the critic, things both intrinsic and extrinsic to the text. Burke writes, “The main ideal of criticism, as I conceive it, is to use all that is there to use” (Philosophy 23). The biography of the writer, the social situations surrounding the work, the terms used by the writer and reader, politics, history, economics, ecology, physiology, and psychoanalysis—all provide fruitful insight into a text.2 This broad scope caused Andrew King to look back with pleasure on the rise of Burkean criticism, with its adherents across disciplines like English,