Wayne C.

Booth
Wayne Clayson Booth (February 22, 1921 in American Fork, Utah, – October 10, 2005 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American
literary critic. He was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language & Literature and
the College at the University of Chicago. His work followed largely from the Chicago school of literary criticism.

Contents
Life
The Rhetoric of Fiction
Other works
Works
Notes
External links

Life
Born in Utah of Mormon parents, Booth was educated at Brigham Young University and the University of Chicago. He taught
English at Haverford College and Earlham College before moving back to the University of Chicago. He maintained his
membership in the LDS Church throughout his life, but took the position that many religions were equally acceptable and
sufficient.[1]

The Rhetoric of Fiction

In what was likely Booth's most-recognized book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, he argued that all narrative is a form of rhetoric.

The book can be seen as his critique of those he viewed as mainstream critics. Booth argues that beginning roughly with Henry
James, critics began to emphasize the difference between "showing" and "telling" in fiction and have placed more and more of a
dogmatic premium on "showing."

Booth argued that despite the realistic effects that modern authors have achieved, trying to distinguish narratives in this way is
simplistic and deeply flawed, because authors invariably both show and tell. Booth observed that they appear to choose between
the techniques based upon decisions about how to convey their various "commitments" along various "lines of interest."

Booth's criticism can be viewed as distinct from traditional biographical criticism (still practiced, especially among popular
critics), the new criticism that argued that one can talk only about what the text says, and the modern criticism that argues for the
"eradication" of authorial presence. Booth claimed that it is impossible to talk about a text without talking about an author,
because the existence of the text implies the existence of an author.

Booth argued not only that it does not matter whether an author—as distinct from the narrator—intrudes directly in a work, since
readers will always infer the existence of an author behind any text they encounter, but also that readers always draw conclusions
about the beliefs and judgments (and also, conclusions about the skills and "success") of a text's implied author, along the text's
various lines of interest:
 However impersonal he may try to be, his readers will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who
writes in this manner -- and of course that official scribe will never be neutral toward all values. Our reaction to
his various commitments, secret or overt, will help to determine our response to the work.[2]

This implied author (a widely used term that Booth coined in this book; whom he also called an author's "second self"[3]) is the
one who "chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man;
he is the sum of his own choices."[4]

In The Rhetoric of Fiction Booth coined the term "unreliable narrator".

Booth also spent several chapters—which include numerous references to and citations from widely recognized works of fiction
—describing the various effects that implied authors achieve along the various lines of interest that he identifies, and the pitfalls
they fall into, depending upon whether the implied author provides commentary, and upon the degree to which a story's narrator
is reliable or unreliable, personal or impersonal.

Booth detailed three "Types of Literary Interest" that are "available for technical manipulation in fiction":

(1) Intellectual or cognitive: We have, or can be made to have, strong intellectual curiosity about "the facts," the
true interpretation, the true reasons, the true origins, the true motives, or the truth about life itself. (2) Qualitative:
We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire to see any pattern or form completed, or to experience a further
development of qualities of any kind. We might call this kind "aesthetic," if to do so did not suggest that a literary
form using this interest was necessarily of more artistic value than one based on other interests. (3) Practical: We
have, or can be made to have, a strong desire for the success or failure of those we love or hate, admire or detest;
or we can be made to hope for or fear a change in the quality of a character. We might call this kind "human," if to
do so did not imply that 1 and 2 were somehow less than human.[5]

In the 1983 edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction, which included a lengthy addendum to the original 1961 edition, Booth outlined
various identities taken on by both authors and readers: The Flesh-and Blood Author, the Implied Author, the Teller of This Tale,
the Career Author, and the "Public Myth"; and, the Flesh-and-Blood Re-Creator of Many Stories, the Postulated Reader, the
Credulous Listener, the Career Reader, and the Public Myth about the "Reading Public."[6]

Other works
A later work is Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, in which he addresses the question of what circumstances should
cause one to change one's mind, discussing what happens in situations where two diametrically opposed systems of belief are in
argument. His central example is an incident at the University of Chicago, when some students and administrators were engaged
in fierce debate that eventually degenerated into each side simply reprinting the other side's arguments without comment,
believing that the opposing side was so self-evidently absurd that to state its propositions was to refute them.

Another book of note is 1974's The Rhetoric of Irony, in which Booth examines the long tradition of irony and its use in literature.
It is probably his second most popular work after The Rhetoric of Fiction.

A later work is The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, in which he returns to the topic of rhetorical effects in fiction, and
"argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature" (cover note, The Company we Keep).

The University of Chicago Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching was established in
1991 in honor of Booth. The award is given out annually.

Additionally, Booth House within the University of Chicago College Housing is named in honor of Booth.
Works
The Rhetoric of Fiction (The University of Chicago Press, 1961, 1983) ISBN 9780226065588
Boring from Within: The Art of the Freshman Essay (c. 1963) pamphlet
Knowledge Most Worth Having (The University of Chicago Press, 1967) editor, ISBN 9780226065762
Now Don't Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age (The University of Chicago Press,
1970) ISBN 9780226065809
Autobiography of Relva Booth Ross (1971)
Booth Family History (1971)
A Rhetoric of Irony (The University of Chicago Press, 1974) ISBN 9780226065533
Modern Dogma & the Rhetoric of Assent (The University of Chicago Press, 1974) Ward-Phillips Lectures in
English Language and Literature, ISBN 9780226065724
Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (The University of Chicago Press, 1979)
ISBN 9780226065557
The Harper and Row Rhetoric: Writing As Thinking, Thinking As Writing (1987) with Marshall W. Gregory
The Harper & Row Reader: Liberal Education Through Reading & Writing (1988) with Marshall W.Gregory
The Vocation of a Teacher: Rhetorical Occasions, 1967-1988 (The University of Chicago Press, 1988)
ISBN 9780226065823
The Art of Deliberalizing: A Handbook for True Professionals (1990)
The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (University of California Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-520-06203-0)
The Art of Growing Older: Writers on Living and Aging (editor) (The University of Chicago Press, 1992, 1996)
ISBN 9780226065496
The Craft of Research (The University of Chicago Press, 1995, 2003, 2008) with Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph
M. Williams ISBN 9780226065663
Literature as Exploration (1996) with Louise Michelle Rosenblatt
For the Love of It: Amateuring & Its Rivals (The University of Chicago Press, 1999) ISBN 9780226065861
Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication (2004) Blackwell Manifesto
My Many Selves: The Quest for a Plausible Harmony (2006)
The Essential Wayne Booth (The University of Chicago Press, 2006) edited by Walter Jost,
ISBN 9780226065922
The Knowing Most Worth Doing (The University of Virginia Press, 2010) edited by Walter Jost

Notes
1. Booth, Wayne C. (March 1998), "Confessions of an Aging, Hypocritical Ex-Missionary" (PDF) (https://www.sunsto
nemagazine.com/pdf/109-25-36.pdf), Sunstone: pp. 25–36
2. The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 71.
3. The term "second self" was brought into prominence by Kathleen Tillotson (1959), see Tom Kindt, Hans-Harald
Müller, The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy (2006) p. 50.
4. The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 74-75.
5. The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 125.
6. The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 428-431.

External links
Wayne C. Booth, Critic Who Analyzed Rhetoric, Dies at 84 (https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/books/11booth.
html)
Wayne Booth, Professor Emeritus of English, 1921-2005 (http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/05/051011.bo
oth.shtml)
Interview with Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams - authors of The Craft of Research (http://ww
w.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/065685in.html) by The University of Chicago Press
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This page was last edited on 19 June 2018, at 00:20 (UTC).

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