Vast, ecumenical defense and reappraisal of the Old Guard
Humanist/Subjectivist critical line in literary criticism. Booth
(English/U. of Chicago; The Rhetoric of Fiction) goes for it all
here, invoking and assimilating everyone from Plato to new feminist
criticism in reprivileging the notion of an ethical criticism.
Taking quite seriously the spirit of I.A. Richards' claim that
"Poetry is capable of saving us," Booth wends his way through the
literary history of the world - from Genesis to Jaws - to explain
and demonstrate the way narrative literally acts on our souls.
Booth essentially consecrates the experience of literature,
praising authors and books that provide "a richer and fuller life
than I could manage on my own," and invents his own neologism -
"coduction" - to define the act of reading ethically, relatively,
openly. This bit of critical sleight of hand - since there is
little new about Booth's methodology but the term he invents for it
- is then extended into virtually every area of critical thought.
He examines the rise and fall of ethical criticism, the
relationship of critical ethics to other ideological models like
Marxism and feminism, and conducts a sometimes dazzling rhetorical
analysis of metaphor and cosmology. The book finally settles down
into application in the closing chapters, where Booth tests his
paradigm against the works of Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, and, in a
truly inspired revisionist reading, Huckleberry Finn. More earnest
than original, comprehensive than precise, Booth nevertheless
delivers up a profound and timely treatise that will cheer
traditionalists, annoy revisionists, and without fail refuel
critical debate among literary theorists of every stripe. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In "The Company We Keep", Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation
of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the
questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to
its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be
interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or
quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk
talking about the quality of this particular encounter with this
particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive
judgments of 'good' work and 'bad'. Rather it will be a
conversation about many kinds of personal and social goods that
fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences
for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to
that more immediate topic, What happens to us as we read? Who am I,
during the hours of reading or listening? What is the quality of
the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a
wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works,
Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: 'friendship
with books', 'the exchange of gifts', 'the colonizing of worlds',
'the constitution of commonwealths'. He concludes with extended
explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works
by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.
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