[Ucrcompteachers] Fwd: Wayne C. Booth, Critic Who Analyzed Rhetoric, Dies at 84

[John Briggs]

>I thought this obituary would be of special interest.

-- John Briggs


>Mailing-List: list alscfriends at googlegroups.com;
>         contact alscfriends-owner at googlegroups.com
>List-Id: <alscfriends.googlegroups.com>
>List-Post: <mailto:alscfriends at googlegroups.com>
>List-Help: <mailto:alscfriends-help at googlegroups.com>
>List-Unsubscribe: <http://googlegroups.com/group/alscfriends/subscribe>,
>         <mailto:alscfriends-unsubscribe at googlegroups.com>
>X-Junkmail-Status: score=45/65, host=sentinel.ucr.edu
>
>
>October 11, 2005
>Wayne C. Booth, Critic Who Analyzed Rhetoric, Dies at 84
>By MARGALIT FOX
>
>Wayne C. Booth, one of the pre-eminent literary critics of the second half 
>of the 20th century, whose lifelong study of the art of rhetoric 
>illuminated the means by which authors seduce, cajole and more than 
>occasionally lie to their readers in the service of narrative, died 
>yesterday morning at his home in Chicago. He was 84.
>
>The cause was complications of dementia, his daughter Katherine Booth 
>Stevens said.
>
>A longtime faculty member of the University of Chicago, he was at his 
>death the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of 
>English there. His books, which are part of the core curriculum at 
>universities around the world, include "The Rhetoric of Fiction" 
>(University of Chicago, 1961); "A Rhetoric of Irony" (University of 
>Chicago, 1974); and "The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction" 
>(University of California, 1988).
>
>His latest book, a memoir titled "My Many Selves," is scheduled to be 
>published next year by Utah State University Press.
>
>To many earlier critics, notably the New Critics of the mid-20th century, 
>literature was meant to exist in a kind of social vacuum, to be described 
>critically in terms of the text, and only the text. But to Professor 
>Booth, literature was not so much words on paper as it was a complex 
>ethical act. He saw the novel as a kind of compact between author and 
>reader: intimate and rewarding, but rarely easy. At the crux of this 
>compact lay rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion.
>
>The author's task, he argued, was to draw readers into the web of 
>narrative and hold them there. The critic's task was to tease out the 
>specific rhetorical devices - linguistic, stylistic, symbolic - by which 
>this was accomplished. To describe the intricate, shifting dance between 
>author and reader, he coined a number of critical terms that are now 
>common parlance, among them "implied author" and "unreliable narrator."
>
>Where his early work explored the use of rhetoric in narrative, his later 
>work considered diverse forms of communication, from political discourse 
>to television commercials. In a sense, his books are users' manuals, 
>explaining why these forms work as evocatively as they do.
>
>"He made rhetoric into a way to deal with so many of the problems of the 
>modern world," James Phelan, Humanities Distinguished Professor of English 
>at Ohio State University, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "He 
>took that work, which was really about the ways in which authors 
>communicate to readers, and began to think more broadly about the ways in 
>which people on different sides of ideological divides can communicate 
>with each other."
>
>Wayne Clayson Booth was born on Feb. 22, 1921, in American Fork, Utah. His 
>family was descended from Mormon pioneers, and as a young man he embraced 
>his faith, becoming a missionary in Chicago. But little by little, he 
>began to wrestle with church teachings. It was a struggle, he later said, 
>that informed both his decision to root himself in the secular world and 
>his particular interest in rhetoric.
>
>He earned a bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University in 1944, a 
>master's from the University of Chicago in 1947 and a Ph.D. from Chicago 
>in 1950. During World War II, he was a clerk-typist for the Army infantry, 
>stationed in Paris. After teaching at Haverford and Earlham Colleges, he 
>joined the Chicago faculty in 1962. He retired in 1992.
>
>Besides his daughter, of Northleach, England, he is survived by his wife, 
>the former Phyllis Barnes, whom he married in 1946; another daughter, 
>Alison, a professor of English at the University of Virginia; and three 
>grandchildren. A son, John Richard, died in 1969.
>
>Professor Booth's other books include "Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of 
>Assent" (University of Notre Dame, 1974); "Critical Understanding: The 
>Powers and Limits of Pluralism" (University of Chicago, 1979); "The 
>Vocation of a Teacher" (University of Chicago, 1988); and "The Rhetoric of 
>Rhetoric" (Blackwell, 2004). He was also a founder of the journal Critical 
>Inquiry.
>
>In "The Company We Keep," widely regarded as one of his most significant 
>books, he argued that criticism itself, far from being a detached 
>abstraction, should be an act of ethical judgment.
>
>"Overt ethical appraisal is one legitimate form of literary criticism," he 
>wrote. "Anyone who attempts to invite ethical criticism back into the 
>front parlor, to join more fashionable, less threatening varieties, must 
>know from the beginning that no simple, definitive conclusions lie ahead. 
>I shall not, in my final chapter, arrive at a comfortable double column 
>headed 'Ethically Good' and 'Ethically Bad.' But if the powerful stories 
>we tell each other really matter to us - and even the most skeptical 
>theorists imply by their practice that stories do matter - then a 
>criticism that takes their 'mattering' seriously cannot be ignored."
>
>Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1989, Anatole Broyard called 
>the book "almost indecently satisfying."
>
>Not everyone was persuaded by Professor Booth's rhetorical style, which 
>some critics found stiff, even pretentious. But most reviewers were 
>enchanted with his 1999 memoir, "For the Love of It" (University of 
>Chicago), a very personal account of learning to play the cello as an adult.
>
>As the story of Professor Booth's passion for chamber music unfolds, the 
>book becomes an exploration of the idea of amateurism as a form of ethical 
>responsibility. Even its title, which invokes the original, positive, 
>meaning of "amateur," was a carefully considered rhetorical choice. To 
>him, "amateur," like "rhetoric" before it, was a word that simply begged 
>to be rehabilitated.
>
>http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2005/10/11/books/11booth.html&tntemail1=y