Kenneth Burke and His Circles

The essays were selected from among ones first presented at a 2005 conference at Penn State University, the principal repository of Burke archives, and thus the ideal site for this conference's exploration of the circles Burke participated in. Collectively, the papers presented at the conference conceive circles broadly to encompass Burke's relationships to personal friends (e.g., Ralph Ellison), to major intellectual figures (e.g., Richard McKeon, Wayne Booth, Denis Donoghue), to academic fields of study (e.g., neo-Aristotelianism, corporate communication, Continental philosophy), and to cultural and artistic movements (such as jazz and contemporary poetry). Together, the essays offer new and illuminating perspectives on the complexity and diversity of the circles in which Burke worked to produce one of the important and enduring bodies of work in American intellectual life in the twentieth century.