Wayne C. Booth

Wayne Booth is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Chicago. His work followed largely from the Chicago school of literary criticism.

His most important work is The Rhetoric of Fiction. In this book, Booth argues that all narrative is a form of rhetoric. The speaker, in the case of narrative, is the author, or, more specifically, Booth's concept of the implied author. The implied author is a compromise between old-fashioned biographical criticism, and the new critics who argued that one can only talk about what the text says. Booth argued that it is impossible to talk about a text without talking about an author, because the existence of the text already implies the existence of an author. Although Booth recognizes that it may be the case that this author may not be the same as the actual author.

Booth also notes, however, that this author is distinct from the narrator of the text. He uses the examples of stories with an unreliable narrator to prove this point, observing that, in these stories, the whole point of the story is lost if one confuses narrator and author.

Later works by Booth include Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, in which he engages the question of what circumstances should cause one to change one's mind, discussing what happens in situations where two diametrically opposed systems of belief are in argument. His central example is an incident at the University of Chicago, in which students and administration were engaged in fierce argument that eventually degenerated to each side simply reprinting the other side's arguments without comment, believing that they were so self-evidently absurd as to undermine themselves.

He also wrote The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, a sequel of sorts to The Rhetoric of Fiction in which he makes a case for how one can make ethical judgments about a work of fiction.

As with most Chicago school criticism, Booth is criticized for making overly broad claims about the nature of humanity, and for marginalizing cultures in the process.