Rhetorical Faith

HEVIBW BOOK REVIEWS Rhetorical Faith The Essential Wayne Booth Edited with an Introduction by Walter Jost University of Chicago Press http://www.press.uchicago.edu 344 pages; cloth, $35.00 Wayne C. Booth's career as a literary critic and arhetorician spanned more than fifty years, from his 1951 essays on Tristram Shandy (1759) and Macbeth (1603) to his posthumous 2006 autobiography, My Many Selves: The Questfor a Plausible Harmony. Booth's work is notable for its quality, range, and influence. The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) and The Company We Keep (1988) substantially altered scholarly conversations about narrative technique and the ethics of fiction. Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric ofAssent (1974) has become required reading for any student of twentieth-century rhetorical theory. Critical Understanding (1979) is a starting point for anyone who wants to grapple with the problems of critical conflict. Booth has also written important books about education (The Vocation ofa Teacher: Rhetorical Occasions 1967-1988, [1988]) and about the value of amateur pursuits (For the Love of It: Amateuring and its Rivals [1999]), not to mention textbooks and a voluminous body of essays. This corpus and Booth's considerable rhetorical skills have made him one ofthe most widely read (notjust widely cited) scholars in the humanities over the last half century. Now WalterJost has broughttogether seventeen of Booth's essays and book chapters, spanning the period from 1951 to 2004. Jost's title is, in one sense, an unfortunate choice, since it inevitably conjures up another, much larger collection, the never-tobe -published companion volume "The Inessential Wayne Booth." In another sense, though, Jost's title nicely captures both this book's ambition and its achievement. The seventeen essays, which Jost chose in consultation with Booth, effectively display the range of topics the critic addressed over his long career, even as they return again and again to three issues that he regarded as inextricably related: form (in literature), ethics (in literature, in education, and in life), and rhetoric (always and everywhere, as subject matter and as discipline). Although, as Jost notes in his valuable introduction, anyone previously familiar with Booth's work can justly complain about omissions (I miss having at least one sustained performance by Booth the ironist), the selections constitute an excellent one-volume introduction to Booth's thought. Jost's introduction is valuable because it skillfully places the seventeen essays within the larger context of Booth's writing and makes a good case for regarding character, and more specifically, ethical character as expressed in or affected by rhetorical exchange as the central concern of Booth's work. (Full disclosure: I read a draft of the introduction and offered some suggestions to Jost, and my name appears in his acknowledgments.) In the short space I have, I would like to approach The Essential Wayne Booth from a different angle, that provided by what I think of as Booth's rhetorical faith: his belief that the arts of writing, speaking, reading, and listening are essential to any intellectual activity worthy ofthe name, and mat, when practiced well, are capable of making the world a better place. Chapter 1, "Macbeth as Tragic Hero," is Booth's 1951 exercise in neo-Aristotelian poetics, a skillful analysis of the dramatic means Shakespeare employed to achieve the difficult end of guiding his audience to recognize the horror ofMacbeth's crimes while still maintaining a fundamental sympathy for him. Chapter 17, "Mere Rhetoric, Rhetorology, and the Search for aCommon Learning," is Booth's 1981 case for rhetoric understood as "the development of [the] appraisal (and hence skillful use) ofshared warrants for assent in human exchange" as fundamental to any general education. The difference between the two chapters highlights Booth's transformation from a neo-Aristotelian literary critic to a rhetorical theorist, a transformation effected by his putting his rhetorical faith at the center of his work. Booth's considerable rhetorical skills have made him one ofthe most widely read (notjust widely cited) scholars in the humanities. If form is ultimately a power to produce certain effects in an audience (as Aristotle suggests when he defines tragedy through its capacity, first, to arouse pity and fear and, second, to purge those emotions...