The Company We Keep

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.

Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005) was George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Preface

PART I
RELOCATING ETHICAL CRITICISM
I
Introduction: Etbical Criticism, a Banned Discipline?
2
Why Ethical Criticism Fell on Hard Times
3
The Peculiar "Logic" of Evaluative Criticism
4
The Threat of Subjectivism and the Ethics of Craft
5
Who Is Responsible in Ethical Criticism, and for What?

PART II
THE MAKING OF FRIENDS AND COMMONWEALTHS: CRITICISM AS
ETHICAL CULTURE
Introduction: The Turn to Self-Culture
6
Implied Authors as Friends and Pretenders
7
Appraising Some Friends
8
Consequences for Character: The Faking and Making
of the "Self"
9
Appraising Character: Desire against Desire
IO
Figures That "Figure" the Mind: Images and Metaphors
as Constitutive Stories
II
Metaphoric Worlds: Myths, Their Creators and Critics

PART III
DOCTRINAL CRITICISM AND THE REDEMPTIONS OF CODUCTION
Introduction
12
Rabelais and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism
13
Doctrinal Questions in Jane Austen, D. H. Lawrence,
and Mark Twain

Epilogue: The Ethics of Reading
Appendix: An Anthology of Ethical Gifts, Thank-you
Notes, and Warnings
Bibliography of Ethical Criticism
Index of Subjects
Index of Names and Tides