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This chapter considers the odd status of literary and rhetorical critic Kenneth Burke within English Studies. It does so by examining a debate between Burke and Fredric Jameson that occurred in the late 1970s in the journal Critical Inquiry; careful attention to the nuances of their exchange reveals why Burke has come to occupy such a central role within the discourse of rhetorical theory but has been largely overlooked within literary and critical theory. Although Burke and Jameson share many similarities concerning methodology and a host of related issues, they ultimately split on the structural characteristics of late capitalism. Whereas Burke asserts that capitalism operates by producing conformity and standardization, Jameson argues that capitalism must be understood as a much more dynamic system. Their differences on this matter illuminate a number of underlying tensions within theoretical work produced in the humanities today.

This chapter sets the stage for the book, framing its inquiries into democratic civic life, jazz as civic model, and Kenneth Burke’s aesthetic rhetoric using Burke’s concept of constitutions with the concept of constitutions. For Burke a constitution is rhetorical as it prompts people to work “to substantiate an ought”--to make what they think will be a better way of life tangible, visible and, in the case of jazz, audible. The chapter develops a concept of jazz as constitutional in that sense. Both in the way it is made and in the experience of hearing it played, this music constitutes individuals as a participants in a common project where they can combine their separate gifts toward an end with which each one comes, throught the process, to identify. The chapter then locates this concept in the context of relevant scholarly literature on music and aesthetics, jazz, American civic life, and Kenneth Burke.

This chapter examines the ways in which discourses around irony intersect with discourses of law, race, responsibility, and recognition in the period that saw the institutionalization of both modernism and the New Criticism. Legal and literary history, political theory, and formalist close reading help reframe the ways that Ralph Ellison consistently invoked what he called a “gyroscope of irony” to frame the political reception of his only finished novel. Ellison enacts and expands irony as theorized by his friend Kenneth Burke to form particular dispositions toward information and thus to valorize agonistic disagreement as the means by which just decisions are reached in a democracy. Against attacks on the novel and on Ellison himself as retreating from political engagement, this chapter argues that Invisible Man redefines and undermines definitions of irony, and thereby definitions of politics that are limited either to direct action or to legislative formalism.

The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in the 1930s, which witnesses a severe misapprehension of I. A. Richards's historically informed critical principle of pseudo-statement, while the critical understanding of Kenneth Burke, most notably in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, marks a signal exception to this rule.

This chapter uses jazz to explain Kenneth Burke’s highly rhetorical conception of the arts that follows from both his theory of form and his redirection of rhetoric from persuasion to identification. For Burke, aesthetic form is a particular “way of experiencing” that, when diverse people share it, binds them together in awareness and attitude that affects each one’s present sense of self, of identity. Such rhetoric relies on experience as much as argument, experience that takes the form he described in Counter-Statement that moves people step-by–step to a new state of mind. Jazz music how illustrates this rhetoric of identification that binds people together by a shared experience of commitment to a common project. Such rhetoric can move individuals who differ or even conflict toward cooperation more successfully than argument might. While such shared experience does not demand agreement, it does align people in practical effort and purpose. The cooperative improvisation that makes jazz music provides differing people a way of interacting that enables them to bridge their separation, at least for the duration of their common task.

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of war may be turned against war by focusing on the views of William James, Kenneth Burke, and Stephen Crane. Recent literary criticism has suggested that, far from being powerless or simply neutral vis-à-vis the armed conflicts it seeks to represent, language is complicit with violence. This understanding of the relationship between language and violence has been filed by James Dawes under the rubric of “the disciplinary model”—a model that conceives language and violence “as mutually constitutive.” This chapter first considers the ways in which the hard facts of war and violence may be both acknowledged and worked through before discussing Burke's template for understanding the tension as well as the cooperation between war and peace. It also analyzes James's “The Moral Equivalent of War” and concludes by testing the usefulness of some of Burke's recommendations for literary studies through a reading of Crane's “A Mystery of Heroism.”

This chapter examines how “rhetoric” has been defined and used in different fields within the discipline of English. It examines the writings of two key figures—Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke— who have used rhetoric to underwrite their critical projects. Analyzing de Man and Burke’s respective works illuminates a shared investment in the rhetorical concept of agonism; their shared focus on agonism allows us to think beyond a familiar disciplinary narrative where literary studies’ investment in rhetoric is limited to tropes and figures while composition studies’ investment in rhetoric is limited to persuasion. De Man and Burke’s shared focus on agonism illustrates the discipline’s understanding of criticism as an “unending conversation,” a fact that ultimately complicates any clear divisions between fields within the discipline of English.

Chapter 2 outlines the implications of approaching Methodism as a rhetorical problem, and argues that a rhetorical approach helps to explain why Methodism represented a gateway to salvation for some while others viewed it as a trapdoor to religious enthusiasm. The appeal of Methodism rested, in large part, on what Kenneth Burke refers to as an experience of symbolic identification, an inter-subjective experience in which individuals see themselves in and through the language of others. The ways Methodists experienced and expressed their faith, including the sharing of personal testimony, the publication of spiritual autobiography, preaching, and letter writing, facilitated the kind of symbolic experience Burke describes. Moreover, such an approach is less concerned with theological veracity or the authenticity of religious kinds of experience than with discursive practices.

This chapter defines terrorism as the word may be used in a variety of contexts, from ancient times to the twenty-first century. It shows how stories about terrorism circulated in early modern Europe, with what general significance, in keeping with the operations of a ‘mythography’, a body of ‘enabling fictions’, and a ‘dialectic of recognition’, through political adversaries’ struggle for domination. The aim of the book is explained as an intended contribution to literary and cultural history, using a variety of texts’ textual and supra-textual features, but also as a contribution to ‘critical terrorism studies’. The methodology of the study, derived from Kenneth Burke’s ‘grammar of motives’, is explained and justified.

Focusing on the scenic dimension of the visual register of constituent imagination, Chapter 3 focuses on how select early modern, modern, and contemporary theorists stage the scenes in which a sovereign (people) appears either as the author or as the outcome of the act of constitution. Building on Kenneth Burke’s theory of dramatism, the chapter shows how choreographed interplay among four abstract stage ‘props’ allows constitutional thinkers to stage one of the most important attributes of sovereignty—its capacity for creatio ex nihilo. Through a series of engagements with Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, Sieyès, Lefort, and others, Chapter 3 reveals how they conformed to the unwritten laws of constituent dramatism, as well as the tricks they resorted to in order to bring a sovereign people into imaginative existence.

Part III studies characters who conceive of desire as a dynamic process of mutual creation. These introductory pages explore the world-making capacities of the metaphor ‘Love is a Collaborative Work of Art,’ which conceptualises love as artfully creating a reality. This creative process often invites a third entity—a filter, a buffer, or an instrument—that mediates between the subject and object of desire. When Kenneth Burke writes about the role of instruments in daily life, he emphasises the instrument’s ontological connection, its potential fusion, with the subject who deploys it. This section explores this dynamic connection in the collaborative work of art that is Shakespeare’s Cesario. In Twelfth Night, Cesario is an ongoing process rather than a finished product. An erotic subject, object, and instrument, Cesario keeps becoming Cesario through his/their continued exchanges with Orsino and Olivia.

Part II focuses on spatial metaphors of permeability and containment that dramatize erotic desire as a rupture between self and world. Such metaphors raise the stakes of erotic desire when intimacy requires characters to make themselves vulnerable. They compromise their personal and bodily boundaries but they also gain access to new forms of intimacy. This section of the book begins by exploring different philosophies of place, from thinkers such as Kenneth Burke to Luce Irigaray and Edward Casey, which illuminate the dynamics of desire in Lyly and Shakespeare. The introductory pages focus on the container schema, a basic cognitive structure that allows us to conceptualize bounded regions in space by imagining an inside, outside, and boundary. To illustrate the role of the container schema in erotic experience, these pages analyze Valentine’s speeches about Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Although the famous questions in the play are “Who is Silvia? What is she?,” Valentine himself turns out to be preoccupied with the question, where is Silvia?

The Dial in its later years remains an important magazine, publishing William Carlos Williams’, Paterson along with an appreciation by Kenneth Burke. It featured essays by T. S. Eliot, Malcolm Cowley, Havelock Ellis, George Saintsbury, Bertrand Russell, Paul Valéry, and George Santayana, fiction by D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, E. E. Cummings, and Maxim Gorki; and verse by Hart Crane. In 1929, Thayer's mother and advisors decide to pull out, and the magazine loses its financial backing. The July 1929 issue is the last.

As the final chapter of the book, Chapter 10 confronts the limits of an imagination that is constitutional and constituent, as well as (e)utopian—oriented towards concrete visions of a better life. In doing so, the chapter confronts the role of Square, Triangle, and Circle—which subtly affect the way we think about legal hierarchy, popular sovereignty, and collective self-government. Building on that discussion, the chapter confronts the relationship between circularity, transparency, and iconography of ‘paradoxical’ origins of democratic constitutions. These representations are part of a broader morphology of imaginative obstacles that stand in the way of a more expansive constituent imagination. The second part of the chapter focuses on the most important five—Anathema, Nebula, Utopia, Aporia, and Tabula—and closes with the discussion of Ernst Bloch’s ‘wishful images’ and the ways in which manifold ‘diagrams of hope and purpose’ beyond the people may help make them attractive again.

This chapter offers a memorial retrospective of novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, drawing on the parallels between the author’s and the critic’s common backgrounds and experiences. In novels such as Your Blues Ain’t Mine, Singing in the Comeback Choir, Brothers and Sisters, What You Owe Me, and 72-Hour Hold, Campbell’s subject, broadly speaking, is the modern condition and the human condition—not universalized and flattened out, but read through the complex lenses of race, gender, and class, as these categories intersect to shape individual lives in a society dominated by corporate, mass, and popular culture. Campbell provides what the great cultural critic Kenneth Burke describes as “literature as equipment for living.” Campbell’s novels address the social and psychic challenges and conflicts facing those who seek to live principled and accountable lives, informed by a sense of social justice and an ethic of care.

The Prologue opens with an emblematic moment in 1549, when Lord Protector Somerset ordered the Ossuary at St. Paul’s emptied and the bones of four hundred years of loved ones, ancestors, and neighbors dumped in a marsh. Radical protestants sought to dissociate the present from the past in extreme, traumatic, and not-always theologically driven ways. Such “rage[s] against the dead” sought to erase a deep and affective form of historical memory. Post-Reformation England used a wide range of affective media and technologies in its efforts to understand the gaps that had opened up in the social and affective landscape. Early modern amphitheater drama, a melding of available media, was one of the more telling responses. It was a key component in the period’s “equipment for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s phrase—providing a public place where audiences could experience, investigate, dig into, or salve the cognitive and affective conditions of their own possibility.

Cultural contexts for the starting conditions of contemporary are explored, with a particular focus on the responses of composers who finished their training and entered the profession just as its practices were changing radically, around 1910. Their situation is analyzed according to Edward Hall’s definition of high- and low-context cultures, Kenneth Burke’s concept of “piety,” and the psychological stress of “choice anxiety.” These lead to behaviors that can be read in musical compositions according to a few heuristic binaries: (1) attitudes to historical practice (ironic, sincere); (2) preferences about appeal (popular, rarefied); and (3) identification with communities (local, global). Essays on compositions by Shostakovich, Hindemith, Bernstein, Wilson, Chen, Martin, Barber, Shire, and Prokofiev illustrate pertinent analytic techniques.

This chapter develops a performative account of democracy, one that specifies a number of roles that need to be played, including roles for every member of the demos and roles for elected, selected, or self-selected representatives. It sets out, in broad terms, the theoretical linkages between each role and the kind of stage — the kind of physical public space — that the performance of those roles requires. In doing so, it draws on Kenneth Burke's concept (1969) of the ‘scene-act ratio’, by way of Hajer (2009), arguing that while for some roles and some narrative content pretty much any stage will do, for others there are very specific requirements. In particular, it argues that public claim-making requires highly visible stages, which limits the range of possibilities in interesting ways, and that binding collective decision-making and scrutiny of the decision-makers require not just visible but single stages, putting decision-makers under the spotlight and keeping them there. The implications are these: it is a functional requirement of democracy that binding collective decision-making takes place in a single, visible, and accessible venue; and it is a requirement of democracy that public claims be made in places that are conducive to being noticed and taken seriously by the rest of the demos.

This chapter turns to the interwar period’s reigning assumptions about homosexuality as “sexual inversion,” and to the satiric demolition those assumptions undergo in the works of Djuna Barnes. In accordance with its trademark inversions of the sacred, blasphemy serves Barnes as a uniquely effective means to turn modern sexology on its head. As with James Joyce’s “New Womanly Man,” Mina Loy’s “New Woman,” and the Niggeratti’s irreverent revisions of “the New Negro,” Barnes conscripts a blasphemous aesthetic into the service of articulating a distinctively modernist identity: in this case a queer identity unaccounted for by the period’s popular and scientific discourses of gender and desire.