Abstract

I would like to begin concretely, and the measure of my success in this paper will be the reader's assent to the rhetorical need for me to work in just some such manner as I've chosen. Consider how, at first glance (and for some time thereafter), Wayne Booth impresses one not so much as a single Booth than as a complex field of Booths: teacher, dean, member of university and national seminars-colloquiacommittees uncountable, MLA President, visiting lecturer, author of works on fiction, criticism, film, education, irony, rhetoric, ethics, religion, teaching . .1 In a recent address Booth calls himself a rhetorician, and in his most recent book a generalist (a closer look reveals to the initiate that for Booth these mean the same thing), but a set of questions will have occurred to the thoughtful Booth reader long before: is there a center to this widening (or at least fluctuating) gyre, is there some doctrine, activity, character, that pulls these pursuits together? Is calling oneself a generalist only an unsuccessful dodge of the more obviously demeaning label dilettante (however brilliant this dilettantism may be)? Or is there a unified field theory to account for these many Wayne Booths? Such a unified center does exist, I believe, though my aim in this paper is certainly not hagiographical. No, I am interested in arguing that Booth's version of rhetorical generalism is relevant to understanding-Booth, to be sure; in my view the essential Booth-but more importantly to understanding the very enterprise of rhetoric itself, as a dynamic, changing basis for liberal education-an education precisely to a specific, coherent, intellectual and moral character.2 Booth has never been content with whatever ethical order or identity he may have managed for himself (as real life author or act-er) over forty-odd years of multiform activity. Explicitly in most of his writings, more or less implicitly in the rest, Booth has not only written about rhetorical