The Company We Keep

by Booth, Wayne C.

• ISBN13: 9780520062108
• ISBN10: 0520062108
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1990-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr on Demand

Summary

InThe 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 ofthisparticular encounter withthisparticular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation aboutmanykinds 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 usas 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.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
PART I RELOCATING ETHICAL CRITICISM	1	(156)
Introduction: Ethical Criticism, a Banned Discipline?	3	(22)
Why Ethical Criticism Fell on Hard Times	25	(24)
The Peculiar ``Logic'' of Evaluative Criticism	49	(32)
The Threat of Subjectivism and the Ethics of Craft	81	(44)
Who Is Responsible in Ethical Criticism, and for What?	125	(32)
PART II THE MAKING OF FRIENDS AND COMMONWEALTHS: CRITICISM AS ETHICAL CULTURE	157	(218)
Introduction: The Turn to Self-Culture	159	(10)
Implied Authors as Friends and Pretenders	169	(32)
Appraising Some Friends	201	(26)
Consequences for Character: The Faking and Making of the ``Self''	227	(38)
Appraising Character: Desire against Desire	265	(28)
Figures That ``Figure'' the Mind: Images and Metaphors as Constitutive Stories	293	(32)
Metaphoric Worlds: Myths, Their Creators and Critics	325	(50)
PART III DOCTRINAL CRITICISM AND THE REDEMPTIONS OF CODUCTION	375	(108)
Introduction	377	(6)
Rabelais and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism	383	(38)
Doctrinal Questions in Jane Austen, D. H. Lawrence, and Mark Twain	421	(62)
Epilogue: The Ethics of Reading	483	(8)
Appendix: An Anthology of Ethical Gifts, Thank-you Notes, and Warnings	491	(14)
Bibliography of Ethical Criticism	505	(30)
Index of Subjects	535	(14)
Index of Names and Titles	549