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Ann GeorGe finDinG the time for Burke If there is one thing rhetoric scholars have agreed on, it is that Kenneth Burke was ahead of his time. As Greg Jay observes, “It seems that the uncanny Burke is always one step ahead of his fellow critics” (169). Burke, we’ve been told over the last thirty years, “anticipate[d] so much of what is considered avant-garde today” (Fish 500); “anticipated . . . what have become the most stylish paradoxes in the post-structuralist armory” (Harris 455); “anticipate[d] the critique of nature and totality developed by the Frankfurt School” (Wolfe 67); “anticipate[d]” the “resolutely skeptical . . . postmodern/poststructural project” (Carmichael 144); “anticipate[d] both Thomas Kuhn and Gramsci” (Tompkins 124); “[is credited with having] anticipated . . . the ‘rhetorical turn’ in the human sciences” (Simons and Melia vii). Burke is a theorist “who knew too much, too soon” (Lentricchia 86), who “pointed out” language’s instability “decades before today’s critical theorists” (Brummett xv), and whose “notion of the symbolic act is an anticipation . . . of current notions of the primacy of language” ( Jameson 508). New historicist and cultural materialist critics are his “progeny,” media and cultural studies critics his “legatees” (Holbrook 11, 12). Wayne Booth demurs only slightly when commenting, “I would not want to claim that Burke foreknew everything that Barthes, Derrida, de Man et cie have shocked the academic world with, but I am sure that, if they ever get around to reading him, they will be tempted to moderate their claims to originality” (361n10). But what do we mean when we say that Burke was ahead of his time? Certainly it is a way of acknowledging his brilliance and importance for rhetorical studies. We might wonder, though, about scholars’ determination to replay this litany of Burke’s propheticness, which surely says as much about us as it does about Burke. It points to a certain way of using and valuing theory, a way of doing—or not doing— history. The Burke-ahead-of-his-time theme conjures an image of Burke waiting all these years to be understood—or more pointedly to be understood by us. Indeed Rosalind Gabin argues that once European structuralist and Marxist theory of the 1960s “fertilized” American thought, Burke became both more acceptable and accessible , prompting her to claim, “Burke has found, finally, the rhetorical moment for his message” (198). But surely the pressing economic and political exigencies of, say, the 1930s constituted a significant “rhetorical moment” for Burke’s message. Burke at least seems 30 Ann George to have thought so, judging by his amazing productivity (five books, countless essays and reviews) during this period. Claiming that Burke’s rhetorical moment is here and now makes sense only if what we mean by rhetorical moment is a time when scholars agree with him—as if theorists’ success is to be measured by their academic uptake. Such a claim also implies that Burke belongs not in “his” time, but in “our” time—or that he belongs in no time—which is to say that he belongs in every time or that he’s outside of time altogether. Burke has, in our account of things, become unmoored in time—a troubling limbo for a theorist who insisted that all acts occur within specific scenes. Finally, the depiction of Burke ahead of his time suggests how invested scholars have become in the image of Burke marginalized or misunderstood by his contemporaries , particularly in the 1930s. We see Burke “stand[ing] on the fringe” (Wolin 221) or locked in heroic struggle, a Depression-era David pitted against the Goliath of positivism, orthodoxy, and narrow estheticism. Burke, we assume, was not read or appreciated by his early contemporaries because of his unique understanding that all experience is ideologically constructed; this line of thinking often leads to the conclusion that Burke left no mark on his contemporary scene; that, rhetorically , “Burke’s adaptation to his milieu was largely ineffective” (Wolin 39).1 Of course, in the 1930s Burke was dismissed, embattled, misunderstood. Sometimes . But might not the story be more complicated? As Ross Wolin has observed, with a few notable exceptions, Burke scholars have not been especially curious about how Burke’s books were understood and evaluated in their immediate rhetorical moment (xii). This essay seeks to reopen the question of Burke’s contemporary reception, taking Permanence and Change (1935) as a case in point. In doing so, it also demonstrates how archives ask us to reexamine what we “know...

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