Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-1931 (Wisconsin Project on American Writers) [Paperback]

Jack Selzer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0299151840 | ISBN-13: 978-0299151843 | Publication Date: December 1, 1996 | Edition: 1

Capturing the lively modernist milieu of Kenneth Burke’s early career in Greenwich Village, where Burke arrived in 1915 fresh from high school in Pittsburgh, this book discovers him as an intellectual apprentice conversing with “the moderns.” Burke found himself in the midst of an avant-garde peopled by Malcolm Cowley, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, Alfred Stieglitz, and a host of other fascinating figures.
    Burke himself, who died in 1993 at the age of 96, has been hailed as America’s most brilliant and suggestive critic and the most significant theorist of rhetoric since Cicero. Many schools of thought have claimed him as their own, but Burke has defied classification and indeed has often been considered a solitary, eccentric genius immune to intellectual fashions. But Burke’s formative work of the 1920s, when he first defined himself and his work in the context of the modernist conversation, has gone relatively unexamined.
    Here we see Burke living and working with the crowd of poets, painters, and dramatists affiliated with Others magazine, Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, and Eugene O’Neill’s Provincetown Players; the leftists associated with the magazines The Masses and Seven Arts; the Dadaists; and the modernist writers working on literary journals like The Dial, where Burke in his capacity as an associate editor saw T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” into print for the first time and provided other editorial services for Thomas Mann, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and many other writers of note. Burke also met the iconoclasts of the older generation represented by Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, the New Humanists, and the literary nationalists who founded Contact and The New Republic. Jack Selzer shows how Burke’s own early poems, fiction, and essays emerged from and contributed to the modernist conversation in Greenwich Village. He draws on a wonderfully rich array of letters between Burke and his modernist friends and on the memoirs of his associates to create a vibrant portrait of the young Burke’s transformation from aesthete to social critic.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Kenneth Burke set out to live "as a Flaubert" when, as a teenager in 1915, he settled in Greenwich Village. Burke didn't pen another Bovary but he did develop into a valuable critic whose writing on rhetoric, art, and literature defied classification.

Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village explores how Burke's writing helped shape Americans' impressions of art and culture for more than 60 years. In addition to being an invaluable translator of others' work, Burke's early poems, fiction, and essays contributed to the advent of the modernist dialogue that centered in Greenwich Village and included the voices of artists like Alfred Stieglitz and Eugene O'Neill. Jack Selzer's book paints a vibrant portrait of Burke in his environment as he develops from an aesthete to the social critic who lay the foundation for contemporary cultural criticism.

From Publishers Weekly

The contributions of literary critic and rhetorician Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) to the avant-garde modernist movement in Greenwich Village after WWI would seem to be an acquired, rather esoteric taste. But Selzer, himself an English professor and rhetorician at Penn State, provides the interested general reader with intelligible background material sufficient to acquire the taste and satisfies the appetites of those already knowledgeable by presenting some new discoveries. The two chapters of introduction and overview (about a third of the text) make up a masterful survey of the many-sided nature of literary modernism and the rich cultural milieu peopled by figures like Eugene O'Neill, Alfred Stieglitz, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and others. In subsequent chapters, Selzer uses a study of Burke's poetry, short stories and novels as starting points for deeper discussions of relevant modernist trends such as the rise of free verse, the rejection of plot and the growing focus in fiction on associational rather than sequential thought. Selzer's new discoveries about Burke's contributions to modernism reside in his reading of Burke's creative works and letters. The chapter about Burke's 15 months as associate editor of The Dial exemplifies the book's larger merits by exploring that renowned literary periodical, which published among other works T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Assimilating complex material and presenting it in a style free of jargon, Selzer has written an accessible, interesting book. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 254 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (December 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299151840
• ISBN-13: 978-0299151843
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,813,706 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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