Pedagogy

Fulford, Carolyn.
Hearing an Audience: Wayne Booth and the Propagation of Deep Listening
Pedagogy - Volume 6, Issue 2, Spring 2006, pp. 359-365

Duke University Press

Carolyn Fulford - Hearing an Audience: Wayne Booth and the Propagation of Deep Listening - Pedagogy 6:2 Pedagogy 6.2 (2006) 359-365 Hearing an Audience: Wayne Booth and the Propagation of Deep Listening Carolyn Fulford The late Wayne Booth's seminal work of criticism, The Rhetoric of Fiction, changed the language of literary scholarship and continues to inform the study of narrative decades after its first publication. In Booth's lifetime of teaching and scholarship he authored and edited more than a dozen books, working on recurring themes of ethics, rhetoric, and critical pluralism -- all of which matter in English but also engage thinkers in multiple disciplines. Characteristically, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication is not trying to reach only literary critics. This, his final book, addresses "all readers who care about misunderstanding and the skills required to achieve understanding" (xv). Booth's desire to appeal to practically everyone is understandable, considering the urgency that he invests in the project of improving rhetorical education. But rhetoricians who choose the book because the title implies a meta-analysis of their methods of inquiry will be disappointed. And given Booth's observation of the widespread association of the term rhetoric with language of bad faith, if he really wished to reach a lay audience, something like Deep Listening and the Quest for Effective Communication might have been more...