Wayne Booth, Requiescat in Pace ...

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
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://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/books/11booth.html


	
		
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