The Essential Wayne BoothWayne Booth wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time, most notably the 1961 classic The Rhetoric of Fiction, a book that transformed literary criticism and became the standard reference point for advanced discussions of how fiction works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers re-create texts. While Booth’s work was formative to the study of literature, his essential writings have never been collected in a single volume—until now. Selected by Walter Jost in collaboration with Booth himself, the texts anthologized here present a picture of this indispensable critic’s contributions to literary and rhetorical studies. The selections range from memorable readings of Macbeth, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James to engagements with Booth’s intellectual heroes, such as Richard McKeon and Mikhail Bakhtin. But rhetoric, Booth’s abiding concern as a critic and thinker, provides the organizing principle of the anthology. The Essential Wayne Booth illuminates the scope of Booth’s rhetorical inquiry: the entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another. Whether about metaphors for our friendship with books or the two cultures of science and religion, the texts collected here always return to the techniques and ethics of our ways of communicating with each other—that is, to rhetoric. The Essential Wayne Booth is a capstone to Booth's long career and an eloquent reminder of the ways in which criticism can make us alive to the arts of writing, talking, and listening. |
From inside the book
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Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Macbeth as Tragic Hero | 23 |
Control of Distance in Jane Austens Emma | 35 |
The Rhetorical Stance | 55 |
The Revival of Rhetoric | 65 |
Metaphor as Rhetoric | 75 |
The Empire of Irony | 101 |
Richard McKeons Pluralism | 121 |
The Ethics of Forms | 195 |
The Ethics of Teaching Literature | 221 |
Of the Standard of Moral Taste | 239 |
Rhetoric Science Religion | 265 |
The Idea of a University as Seen by a Rhetorician | 281 |
For the Love of It | 303 |
Coda | 315 |
Notes | 335 |
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appraisal argument Aristotle artistic audience Bakhtin believe Booth casuistry catfish chapter character Chicago Press claim Company We Keep course culture discover effects Emma Emma’s essay ethical criticism example experience fact feel finally Frank Churchill friendship genuine Henry James hope human implied author inquiry intellectual ironic irony Jacques Derrida James Jane Austen judge judgments Kate Kenneth Burke kind Knightley language least listening literary literature live Macbeth Mailer mean metaphor Milly modern moral narrative never notion novel obviously offer perhaps persuasion philosophical Pluralism poem political practice pursue question re-reading readers reading reason religion Rhetoric of Fiction rhetorician Richard McKeon Ronald Crane scientific scientists sense share story talk teachers teaching term things thought true truth understand University of Chicago University Press values virtues Wally Walker Wayne Booth word writing