Language As Symbolic Action Essays on Life, Literature, and Method

Reviews

"Language as Symbolic Action, as its subtitle tells us, collects under a single cover many of Burke's essays which have appeared in widely diverse periodicals. In some respects Burke has been an eminence gris on the academic and scholarly scene. His wide-ranging interests have placed many of his most important essays in obscure periodicals, and they have produced syntheses whose brilliance is matched only by the difficulties of reading they have posed for often too narrowly trained specialists. And, without a formal training in an academic discipline, he has seldom surveyed the work of the men on whom he has drawn. Very often the reader who has not read Ogden and Richards, Korzybski, Nietzsche, and Freud--to name only a few--finds Burke very difficult going at best. In many respects Language as Symbolic Action presents Burke at his best. In these essays he is most completely his own man and least dependent on his sources; these essays demand less prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Here the structure of "collected essays" allows the reader to move from the inductive development of basic notions to their specific applications in literary criticism, rhetoric, and language. In many ways Language as Symbolic Action provides a reader new to Burke with an excellent introduction to his most mature work." Reviewed by: Nelson J. Smith, IIIPhilosophy & RhetoricVol. 1, No. 3 (Summer, 1968), pp. 187 - 189