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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
required reading for anyone who cares about literature:
In his usual thorough, encyclopedic way, Booth discusses many of the issues concerning the effects of fiction in the real world on real people. And as usual, he bends over backward to be fair to everybody. He gives patient, exhaustive treatments of all arguments and claims, even the most idiotic, showing their inadequacies. But people who put forth idiotic arguments do not do so because they are stupid but because they are committed, and committed people do not respond to reason, however patient and... more info
Matchless:
Muddled in endless cultural anxieties, or battling feverishly in various intellectualized ghettos of fashionable cultural politics and so many psychoanalyticalisms or poststructuralisms, most contemporary literary critics and historians fail to provide us with truly original substantive insights based on a union of thorough close reading, historical contexting and ethical speculation. Instead critics today impose a theoretical template upon works as if they are writing only for their present-day... more info
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