Wayne C. Booth
Encyclopedia
Wayne Clayson Booth 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
.
of Mormon parents, he 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
.
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 argues 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:
(a widely-used term that Booth coined in this book; who he also called an author's "second self") 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"
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 or not 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":
In the Rhetoric of Fiction Wayne Booth coined the term "unreliable narrator
".
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.
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
. His work followed largely from the Chicago school
Chicago school (literary criticism)
The Chicago School of literary criticism was a form of criticism of English literature begun at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, which lasted until the 1950s. It was also called Neo-Aristotelianism, due to its strong emphasis on Aristotle’s concepts of plot, character and genre...
of literary criticism
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
.
Life
Born in UtahUtah
Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...
of Mormon parents, he was educated at Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University is a private university located in Provo, Utah. It is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , and is the United States' largest religious university and third-largest private university.Approximately 98% of the university's 34,000 students...
and the University of Chicago. He taught English at Haverford College
Haverford College
Haverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia...
and Earlham College
Earlham College
Earlham College is a liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana. It was founded in 1847 by Quakers and has approximately 1,200 students.The president is John David Dawson...
before moving back to the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
.
The Rhetoric of Fiction
In what was likely Booth's most-recognized book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, he argued that all narrativeNarrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
is a form of rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
.
The book can be seen as his critique of those he viewed as mainstream critics. Booth argues that beginning roughly with Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice 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 argues that despite the realistic effects
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
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
Biographical criticism
Biographical criticism is a form of Literary criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the relationship between the author's life and their works of literature...
(still practiced, especially among popular critics), the new criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
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
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
—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.This implied author
Implied author
The implied author is a concept of literary criticism developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the character a reader may attribute to an author based on the way a literary work is written, which may differ considerably from the author's true...
(a widely-used term that Booth coined in this book; who he also called an author's "second self") 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"
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 or not 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.In the 1983 edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction, in which a lengthy addendum to the original 1961 book was published, 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."
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. In it, students and administration 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.In the Rhetoric of Fiction Wayne Booth coined the term "unreliable narrator
Unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
".
Another book of note is 1974's The Rhetoric of Irony
The Rhetoric of Irony
The Rhetoric of Irony is a book about irony by American literary critic Wayne Booth. Booth argues that in addition to forms of literary irony, there are ironies that lack a stable referent....
, 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.
Sources
- The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago PressUniversity of Chicago PressThe University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
, 1961. - The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988.
Works
- Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)
- Boring from Within: The Art of the Freshman Essay (c. 1963) pamphlet
- Knowledge Most Worth Having (1967) editor
- Now Don't Try to Reason with Me : Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age (1970)
- Autobiography of Relva Booth Ross (1971)
- Booth Family History (1971)
- A Rhetoric of Irony (1974)
- Modern Dogma & the Rhetoric of Assent (1974) Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature
- Critical Understanding : The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (University of Chicago PressUniversity of Chicago PressThe University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
, 1979) - 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 (1988)
- The Art of Deliberalizing: A Handbook for True Professionals (1990)
- The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1992) (University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-06203-0)
- The Art of Growing Older: Writers on Living and Aging (1992) editor
- The Craft of ResearchThe Craft of ResearchThe Craft of Research is a book by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The book aims to provide a basic overview of how to research, from the process of selecting a topic and gathering sources to the process of writing results. The book has gone through three editions, and...
(1995, 2003, 2008) with Gregory G. ColombGregory G. ColombGregory G. Colomb was a professor of the English language and literature and Director of Writing Programs at the University of Virginia. His research interests were in writing studies, 18th century literature, and theory. He studied at Rice University and University of Virginia...
and Joseph M. WilliamsJoseph M. WilliamsJoseph M. Williams was a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.Williams began as a researcher of English language...
(University of Chicago PressUniversity of Chicago PressThe University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
) - Literature as Exploration (1996) with Louise Michelle Rosenblatt
- For the Love of It : Amateuring & Its Rivals (1999)
- Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication (2004) Blackwell Manifesto
- My Many Selves: The Quest for a Plausible Harmony (2006)