Kenneth Burke, music, and rhetoric

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on the important but largely unexplored intersection between Kenneth Burke's interest in music and his rhetorical theory. Throughout his life, Burke expressed a deep interest in reviewing, writing, and playing a variety of musical genres, and my examination focuses primarily on music reviews Burke wrote for The Nation in the 1930s, correspondence he kept with friend and musical composer Louis Calabro in 1961, and music journals and compositions Burke wrote throughout his life.^Based on my analysis of these artifacts, my dissertation a) shows how Burke's interest in music substantially influenced his rhetorical ideas; b) reveals a Burkean theory of multimodality through the incorporation of recent multimodal scholars such as Kristie Fleckenstein and Richard Lanham; c) understands Burke's view on nonlinguistic language by aligning him with language theorists such as Susanne Langer and Ernst Cassirer; and finally, d) shows how Burke himself employed rhetorical principles in his musical and multimodal works. In Chapter one, I outline my project, which employs a rhetorical history methodology. This methodology allows me not only to examine historical approaches to multimodality but also to argue for its value in current approaches. Drawing on four of Kenneth Burke's music reviews in The Nation, I argue in Chapter two that the shifting music scene of the 1930s heavily influenced Burke's development of the key concept secular conversion" in Permanence and Change.^In Chapter three, I focus on Burke's later Nation reviews to recreate the important socio-political role music was serving in Burke's rhetorical theory as WW II approached. Chapter four more fully examines Burke's views on music as a symbol system through his 1961 correspondence with Bennington colleague and music composer Louis Calabro. In the final chapter, I shift from examining Burke as a music critic and language theorist to examining Burke the musician and multimodal composer. Burke's musical compositions reveal an enactment his rhetorical theory in a nonlinguistic symbolic system"--Abstract.