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series eDitor’s PrefAce In 1974 Penn State University purchased the first of several sections of the archives of Kenneth Burke. Further acquisitions have extended that first purchase—first twelve linear feet of letters and other papers; then in 2000 to 2005 another twentyfive linear feet. Most recently another eighteen linear feet of materials, including correspondence, manuscripts, notes, reviews, and related materials were added to the collection. Kenneth Burke’s long and productive life as one of the most important literary and rhetorical theorists of the twentieth century—perhaps the most important—is enriched in the archives by his lively correspondence with major intellectual figures over the decades. For years Penn State professor of English Jack Selzer, the author of important studies of the work and life of Kenneth Burke, has taught a graduate seminar based on the Burke archives at Penn State. Recently he has been joined in that effort by Debra Hawhee, once a student in the seminar and now professor of English at Penn State. The editors of the present volume, Dana Anderson and Jessica Enoch, have brought together a remarkable group of research scholars from English and communication , many of them graduates of Jack Selzer’s famous Burke seminar, with their own reports of the research the archives have made possible. The result is a fascinating reexamination of Burke’s work, raising new questions about archival research, about the Burke archives, about Burke’s relations with his contemporaries, and about Burke’s theories of rhetoric, technology, and language. The essays take Burke seriously, but they avoid the hazards—which Burke warned against—of piety, and they sometimes take Burke to task. Sandra Stelts, the curator, and Jeanette Sabre, the collections processor of the Kenneth Burke Papers at Penn State University, describe the history of the archive. Ann George offers a lively revisionist account of the reception of Burke’s Permanence and Change (1935), contesting the claim that Burke’s work was ignored in his own time by invoking a lively set of previously undiscovered reviews, notes, and correspondence from the archives. George shows how very much Burke was in and of his time. Ned O’Gorman and Ian Hill pursue an undeveloped hint from the archives about the work of Burke and Lewis Mumford on “the poetics of technology,” finding common intellectual ground and a common concern for methodology. Dave viii Series Editor’s Preface Tell reconstructs a frustrating debate between Frederic Jameson and Kenneth Burke, which began with a keynote address by Jameson to the 1977 English Institute. Burke, present at the 1977 meeting, was deprived of a chance to reply to what he thought a seriously mistaken attack on his own work; his reply came later in the journal Critical Inquiry with “Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment .” Tell finds rich evidence in the archives about Burke’s agitated state of mind in the face of Jameson’s criticism, but he faults Burke for failing in his response to live up to his own standards, at the same time calling it both tragic and instructive and arguing that though there were “no winners” in the exchange, it demonstrates “the necessity and the limits of logology.” Keith Gibson has found in the archives a 1956 Burke interview with Swedish radio that offers new reflections on Burke and technology. Jeff Pruchnic explores Burke’s correspondence and his manuscript drafts to investigate the way Burke negotiated the relations of his private beliefs and public voice. Michelle Smith uses the archives to revisit the 1982 Conference of the Eastern Communication Association, at which Burke was present to hear and then respond to papers by Bernard Brock and Herbert Simons on his work. Burke surprised the panel and an overflow auditorium by telling the panelists they had it wrong. Jodie Nicotra investigates a Burkean encounter with mysticism. Scott Wible explores Burke’s teaching career at Bennington College. Debra Hawhee, refashioning a notion from Kenneth Burke, suggests “historiography by incongruity” as an archival methodology, using the archive not so much to pin down the indefinite as to unsettle the tidy. In the afterword Jack Selzer describes his own archival adventures, at Penn State and elsewhere, including how he got hooked, and describing human relationships derailed by editorial elisions and unsent letters as well as friendships cemented by visits to Burke’s place in Andover, New Jersey. Of his years of working with the archives, Jack has written, “What teachers Kenneth Burke and his colleagues have been!” Thomas W. Benson...

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