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Thursday, October 13, 2005
Remembering Wayne Booth
Posted by Jonathan Goodwin on 10/13/05 at 11:55 AM
Anthropologist Alex Golub has posted a remembrance of Wayne Booth.
I never met Booth, though The Rhetoric of Fiction, A Rhetoric of Irony, and The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction were all influential books I read as an undergraduate. The latter volume, in particular, seemed very alien to me when I first read it, but it’s one that I find myself increasingly thinking about when teaching. (Booth claims in it, as I remember, that Bataille wrote The Story of O.) Booth’s co-written The Craft of Research is also the best book of its type, in my opinion, and probably should be issued to all college freshmen.
Booth’s work had wide-ranging influence, and perhaps we can use the comments to discuss it.
Oh, that’s sad news. Booth is probably the single most important influence on Narratology in Tel-Aviv university after Aristotle and the Russian Formalists. More than anything, he offered a synthesis between rigorous, theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of fiction and tradition, free-hand criticism - his work has accuracy and analytic merit enough to satisfy the gravest of structuralist, but the ring and flow of the best journalistic writing.
In particular, his conception of distances (ethical distance, distance in linguistic competence, intellectual distance) between the Implied Author (A term strongly associated with Booth’s influence which in itself is a foundation of modern Narratology), narrator, and characters has become so inherent to everything I do when thinking about literature, in and out of the academy, I can’t imagine the state of things without his work: The vocabulary he shaped is as vital and unavoidable for me as “plot” or “character”.
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