Wayne Booth

Wayne Booth was a professor of English at the University of Chicago. His work brought rhetoric back into literary criticism and treated reading as an ethical encounter between author, text, and reader.

¶Core ideas

• Implied author: the constructed author-figure a reader infers from a text, distinct from the biographical writer
• Ethics of fiction: reading as a friendship-like relation that shapes character
• Pluralism: no single critical method exhausts a text; methods must be matched to questions

¶Key works

• The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)
• Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (1974)
• The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988)