Here & Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke

by Kenneth Burke, Denis Donoghue (Introduction)

The gorgeous, brilliant essay-stories of Kenneth Burke were unlike any other fiction of the 1920s. Here & Elsewhere  gathers, for the first time, all of Burke’s 23 short stories and  Towards a Better Life , which Denis Donoghue calls “one of my favorite novels, full of sentences so luminous that I could be easily persuaded that style is everything.”

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Kenneth Duva Burke was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.

Reviews

[Dan]

So I used to subscribe to a now-defunct really good short-story journal, Glimmer Train, that published work by emerging writers in its quarterly issues. I noticed a trend, however, that didn't wow me: the frequent appearance of pieces that seemed formulaic, written in a style assumedly taught in MFA programs, focused on method rather than content. The pieces gave the impression of being acts of self-gratification, written for the sake of writing and not because there was a story to be told. Boring.

I think Burke must have been the grandfather of this avant-garde approach. I wanted to like "Here & Elsewhere" given the glowing descriptions I'd come across but I just can't get into his style despite several attempts over the past few years. It strikes me that style rather than story is what he's all about.

I'll put this aside (again!) and maybe pick it up in a few more years when I may have a different outlook. In the meantime, I think a more fitting title would have been "There & Nowhere."