ABSTRACT
In his own foreword to the second edition of The Philosophy of Literary Form,l Kenneth Burke writes: "Despite the fact that anthropology and literary criticism share the realm of 'myth' in common, purists will often frown upon a word such as 'scapegoat' on the grounds that it does not belong to the theory of tragedy (which is, etymologically, the 'goat-song'!). I would hold, on the other hand: Many sociological and anthropological concepts have their analogues in literary criticism proper. With the rise of aesthetics, such concepts got unnecessarily exiled; and they found a home in these supposedly alien fields" (PLF x). The assumption that literature should be studied as an esoteric kind of utterance, in isolation from the wider language of the culture, is for Burke a dubious one. The "aesthetic" approach to literature, which has involved attention to form in its narrowest sense, has excluded a proper attention to myth, and in particular a proper attention to its social function. For Burke, myth is a symbolic "tool," and literary criticism can help us understand how it works.
