ABSTRACT
Kenneth Burke was on hand for the most experimental and successful period of the Provincetown Players, and he followed political and artistic developments in The Masses. Like many things Burke wrote before the Great Depression, Counter-Statement developed out of Burke's relationships to The Dial and to the other modernist groups and individuals that he encountered in New York. This chapter argues that Burke was a key point of articulation for modernist ideology—that Burke defined his early self and his early work both with and against several key strains in the modernist conversation. In a very real sense, then, Burke developed central chapters in Counter-Statement by working from orthodox modernist premises. Art and criticism for Burke have now become part of a political attitude, "part of an intervention into history", part of an understanding of aesthetics that hearkens back to the reformers at The Masses and that anticipates the Marxist aesthetics so powerful during the 1930s.
