Expression and Sympathy in Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Kenneth Burke

ABSTRACT

As corrective to rhetorical theorists who disparage “expression,” the following article analyzes Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Kenneth Burke on “expression” and its communicative counterpart “sympathy.” Pater viewed ideal style as a unity of expression and sympathy. Wilde saw Christ as the singular representative of absolute expression and sympathy. Burke resolved both expression and sympathy into the “compromise” of the symbol. I advocate for a return to expression and sympathy as rhetorical values in the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. The author thanks Lois Agnew, Stephen Mailloux, Brad McAdon, Jarron Slater, and Karen Whedbee for reading and commenting on drafts of this article in preparation. Members of the Rhetoric Society of America 2019 Institute Workshop on Classical Reception provided support, especially Carolyn Commer, Kathryn Gindlesparger, and Jarron Slater. Robert Gundlach discussed ideas for this article with the author on several occasions. Thanks also to the two RR reviewers, John Belk and Andrew King, who gave helpful suggestions for revision. Especially helpful was the advice to consider W. S. Howell’s Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic, which prompted a major re-conception of the whole project.

2. See Paul Jay, ed.

3. I employ the 1908 version of De Profundis, the most recent edition available at the time of Burke’s letters in 1915.

4. A glimpse of Burke’s social pose in high school may be found in the character of Lowell Waldemar Jones in Burke’s first major short story, “The White Oxen,” written in the spring of 1918:

Universally disliked, he had already learned to carry his unpopularity masterfully by universally disliking; he wafted about him an aura of contempt in general … [he] had set out at this early date to be the sunflower of erudition. An omnivorous reader, he applied his reading inexorably; he wore his learning as his archididascalus, his Lord and Savior, Oscar Wilde, had worn his green carnation. (Here & Elsewhere 163)

Austin Warren believes this to be a self-portrait of Burke (227). The depiction of a pompous disciple of Wilde shows the influence of Wilde’s paradoxical style.

5. Herbert Wichelns, in his foundational essay “The Literary Criticism of Oratory,” calls for the rhetorical critic to observe “the adaption of ideas to the orator’s audience” (185).

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Notes on contributors

William Schraufnagel

William Schraufnagel is currently Adjunct Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse at DePaul University. He received his MA in Rhetoric and Writing Studies from San Diego State University in 2008, and PhD in Communication from the University of Memphis in 2017. His research interests include Kenneth Burke and nineteenth century rhetorical theory.