Working on article revisions today. Specifically, I'm revisiting Burke's "Revolutionary Symbolism in America," his controversial address given at the first American Writers' Congress in 1935. Burke's audience, comprised of radical writers like Langston Hughes and Meridel LeSueuer, reacted with anger and outrage to Burke's thesis that proletariat literature needs to seize a "positive symbol" instead of merely offering representations of abuse. "A poet," Burke wrote, "does not sufficiently golorify his political cause by pictures of suffering and revolt."
Burke argues in the essay that the symbol of The Worker should be replaced with The Person. His reasoning: folks don't strive to be workers. Radical art, in Burke's conception, needs to represent an ideal.
He also suggests that radical art not settle for mere polemic, writing, "Much explicit propaganda must be done, but that is mainly the work of the pamphleteer and political organizer. In the purely imaginitive field, the writer's best contribution to the revolutionary cause is implicit." Burke's implicit representations of the material world have the potential to reach broader, more diverse constituents, as opposed to the polemics which reach only the like-minded: "As a propagandizer, it is not his work to convince the convinced, but to plead with the unconvinced, which requires him to use their vocabular, their values, their symbols, insofar as this is possible." In other words, use the forms and genres and rhetorics of the priveleged, in order to convince the priveleged.
I'm wondering how Burke's ideas--which, again, were greeted with derision at the American Writers' Congress in 1935--speak to, say, Farenheit 911. Is the most effective "imaginitive rhetoric" (what some still call the "poetic") a rhetoric couched in narrative, image, and that which is implicit?
Just a thought.
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