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John McGowan Kenneth Burke For the past several years I have been making my graduate students read Kenneth Burke and, frankly, they don't give a damn. Seeing him through their eyes, I can understand their resistance. Burke, born in 1897, is more a nineteenth- than a twentieth-century writer. His true predecessors are Coleridge and Ruskin, quirky amateur gentlemen-critics of indeterminate politics and legendary logorrhea. The only time I ever saw Burke speak I had to leave the room. Without a note in front of him, he rambled and I couldn't bear the tension of wondering if he could bring himself to an ending before having made an utter fool of himself. I often have the same feeling when reading Ruskin. Descent into nonsensical babbling never seems far away. But Burke's primary allegiance, as declared in Attitudes Toward History (1937), is to comedy, and he proves his faith by drowning in a sea of words again and again only to bob to the surface, scarred but safe once more. You don't "get" Burke unless you are charmed by him, chuckling over his foibles and delighted by his extravagances. But patience can wear thin. Burke demands so much from his readers. So many allowances, so much forgiveness. Whafs in it for us? I have more to forgive Burke than most. I caught the Burke bug when in graduate school myself. Steeped in French theory that I felt was wrong somehow but had no articulate way of refuting, I thought Burke was my way out. Only I also could not articulate what Burke was up to. His work filled my head with ideas that were two inches beyond my grasp—and I went from one book of his to the next, convinced that this new one would make it all come clear. It never did and I wrote a Burke-inspired dissertation on Dickens that made the master's work seem ludd and well-organized by comparison. At the dissertation defense one of my readers suggested that my four-hundred page thesis needed to be divided in two, one half for the argument, the other half for "random aperçus." Needless to say, the work was unpublishable and I paid the price of wandering in professional limbo—adjunct teaching, working for a publisher—for many years after receiving my PhD I didn't read any Burke for a good fifteen years at least. But who can resist returning to the scene of the trauma and, if a professor , inflicting that trauma on one's students? My students' inability to make heads or tails of Burke did not surprise me. But their indifference did. They find him neither intriguing nor charming. Burke is the kind of writer you can only love by condescending to a bit; you must delight in his defects, or all is lost. My students haven't the slightest indination to indulge Burke or, apparently, my taste for him. The young, of course, are famously unforgiving of their elders, but these same students are dedicated readers of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who have tobe forgivenfar more serious crimes (but maybe that is their allure?). Their 242 the minnesota review attitude toward Burke suggests how deadly serious graduate school has become. He is too original—or quirky—to be part of a school, but hasn't created a school of his own so important that it must be studied by all neophytes to the disdpline. Therein lies another part of the problem. Burke is some kind of cross between a literary critic, a philosopher, a cultural critic, and a nonacademic spinner of grand theories. He exists in a no-man's land between the academic and the literary. He's not a good enough writer to become a classic of English prose bike Emerson or Ruskin, but he occupies their spot on the cultural map. Having returned to scratch the itch in my intellectual biography that is Burke, I now find myself not just trying to make sense of his ideas, but also having to explain to my students why they are worthy of attention. Back in 1975, what I found in Burke was a commitment to...

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