Here & elsewhere : the collected fiction of Kenneth Burke / introduction by Denis Donoghue.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burke, Kenneth, 1897-1993.

Language:

English

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

xv, 415 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Here and elsewhere

Place of Publication:

Boston : David R. Godine, Publisher, 2005.

Summary:

Before he turned to criticism and became the American Coleridge, Kenneth Burke was a writer of fiction. His avant-garde short stories were unlike any others of the 1920s; indeed, stories even remotely like them would not come along for decades. Not for Burke the stripped-down language of Hemingway or the topical social satire of Fitzgerald; instead he was intent on constructing rhetorically gorgeous "peopled essays" that anticipated, by nearly half a century, the work of Calvino, Gass, and Nicholson Baker.

More precisely, Burke appropriated for modernism the forgotten formal modes-and the bawdy comic verve-of Tristram Shandy and Candide. His characters are thinkers, not doers; they lament, rejoice, beseech, admonish, aphorize, and inveigh in the manner of a Greenwich Village Samuel Johnson. Between the arias, as it were, they reveal something of themselves, their motives, and their moral predicaments. "Burke's sentences are so eventful," says Denis Donoghue, "that the uneventfulness of the 'whole' is a delusion. [His stories] are like the human body when it seems to be doing nothing ... but all the time the internal life is throbbing and buzzing, all the organs at 'full throttle.'"

Here & Elsewhere collects, for the first time in one volume, all of Burke's fiction, most of it out of print since the 1960s. The centerpiece is Towards a Better Life (1932), a series of grave, malicious epistles by John Neal, a worldly ascetic and philosophical dandy, addressed to his former friend Anthony, a rival for the affections of the alluring young Florence. Here too are twenty short stories, from the previously uncollected "Parabolic Tale" (1917) to Burke's late masterpiece "The Anaesthetic Revelation of Herone Liddell" (1957), as well as three prose exercises-mad riffs on old age, old "isms," and old institutions.

Here & Elsewhere shows, in the words of the TLS, "what a man can do [in] the music of ideas. Burke's stories take their stand on the last ditch: imagination, intensity, style."

Contents:

Towards a Better Life

I "My converse became a monologue" 17

II "If life moves with sufficient slowness" 23

III "This day I spent with Florence" 29

IV "My vengeance lay in complaint" 35

V "Unintended colleague" 41

VI "The twitter of many unrelated bird-notes" 48

I "I am to Genevieve permanently grateful" 55

II "How different, Anthony, are the nights now" 60

III "My exile had unmade itself" 67

IV "Let this be a song" 73

V "Despite them all, in their very faces" 79

VI "A weary trudging homeward in cold dawn" 86

I "Revealments that come of creation without revision" 97

II "Mad girl in white" 106

III "Alter Ego" 113

IV A strory by John Neal 120

V "In partial recapitulation" 134

VI "Testamentum meum" 142

Twenty Stories

The White Oxen (1924) 151

Parabolic Tale, with Invocation (1917) 185

The Excursion (1920) 187

A Man of Forethought (1919) 190

Mrs. Maecenas (1920) 197

The Soul of Kajn Tafha (1920) 211

Olympians (1922) 216

Scherzando (1922) 221

Portrait of an Arrived Critic (1922) 224

David Wassermann (1921) 228

After Hours (1922) 243

My Dear Mrs. Wurtelbach (1923) 249

The Death of Tragedy (1922) 255

The Book of Yul (1922) 264

A Progression (1923) 275

In Quest of Olympus (1923) 285

First Pastoral (1922) 299

Prince Llan (1924) 308

Metamorphoses of Venus (1924) 324

The Anaesthetic Revelation of Herone Liddell (1957) 337

Three Exercises

First Exercise for Year's End (1953) 389

Second Exercise for Year's End (1954) 392

On Creative Dying (1964) 395.

Notes:

"A Black Sparrow Book."

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

1574232029

1574232010

OCLC:

56051161