Transforming Action: Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison Out of the 1930s

This dissertation connects Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison in the context of a radical 1930s culture through their shared term "action" and explains the prominent appearance of "action" in Invisible Man as a vestige of Ellison's radical beginnings. Chapters clarify the emergence of Burke's and Ellison's writings in the 1930s, cluster appearances of "action" in relation to other key terms, assess political motives, and counter readings and appropriations of their work that ignore, reduce, or redirect such political elements. Attending particularly to Burke's first editions of Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History, as well as to uncollected writings in the period, the dissertation draws out Burke's "communistic" attitude, commitments to organized politics as a literary and rhetorical critic, and wariness toward American philosophical pragmatism and John Dewey. It traces radical concerns and tropes from Ellison's early writings to drafts of his novel and places Ellison's positive reception of Burke's paper at the third American Writers' Congress in 1939 alongside the influence of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. The dissertation argues that Burke and Ellison conceived themselves as cultural participants in a project to transform social relations and shows how recent scholarship concerning these writers, especially work seeking to claim them from a neopragmatist perspective, domesticates markers of their 1930s political imaginary.