Rhetoric of Fiction

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II. Literary Genre: The Novel

4. How do elements of irony work in the novel?

Wayne C. Booth. “True Novels Must Be Realistic” and “All Authors Should Be Objective” in Rhetoric of Fiction.

Key Terms (tags): secondary, novel, irony, narratology, implied author, rhetoric

Supporting References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_C._Booth#The_Rhetoric_of_Fiction

2. http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/Booth-site/pages/rhetoric-fiction_intro.htm
3. http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/wayne_booth_and_the_implied_author.htm
4. http://www.icosilune.com/2009/03/wayne-booth-the-rhetoric-of-fiction/
5. http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/the-rhetoric-of-fiction-by-wayne-c-booth/
6. Atttempted outlines:

http://jrcmfavcfa.blogspot.com/2011/03/rhetoric-of-fiction-by-wayne-c-booth.html

http://prelimsandbeyond.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/booth-3/

7. "The Rhetoric of Fiction" and the Poetics of Fictions

Wayne C. Booth

NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction , Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1968), pp. 105-117

Published by: Duke University Press

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345261

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9. Baldick, Chris. "implied author." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. : Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Date Accessed 29 Aug. 2013 .

“Implied author. A term coined by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) to designate that source of a work's design and meaning which is inferred by readers from the text, and imagined as a personality standing behind the work. As an imaginary entity, it is to be distinguished clearly from the real author, who may well have written other works implying a different kind of persona or implied author behind them. The implied author is also to be distinguished from the narrator, since the implied author stands at a remove from the narrative voice, as the personage assumed to be responsible for deciding what kind of narrator will be presented to the reader; in many works this distinction produces an effect of irony at the narrator's expense.”

10. Baldick, Chris. "Chicago critics." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. : Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Date Accessed 29 Aug. 2013 .

“Chicago critics. A group of critics associated with the University of Chicago, who contributed to the volume Critics and Criticisms: Ancient and Modern (1952) edited by the most prominent figure, R. S. Crane. Other members included W. R. Keast, Elder Olson, and Bernard Weinberg; Wayne C. Booth, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), was also associated with the group. The Chicago critics were concerned with accounting for the variety of critical approaches to literature in terms of assumptions about the nature of literary works. They also emphasized the larger structures of literary works, following the example of Aristotle, whom they admired for basing his Poetics (4th century bce) on actual examples rather than on preconceptions. Their interest in plot and in the design of a work as a whole distinguishes them from the New Critics, who concentrated on the study of metaphor and symbol in lyric verse. See also aristotelian.”

11. Birch, Dinah. "narratology." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 29 Aug. 2013 .

“Narratology. The term applied since 1969 to the formal analysis of narratives. Although in principle applicable to ancient theories of storytelling such as *Aristotle's, the term is applied to the modern tradition, of which Morphology of the Folktale (1928) by the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) is taken to be the founding work. Narratology rests upon certain basic distinctions between what is narrated (e.g. events, characters, and settings of a story) and how it is narrated (e.g. by what kind of narrator, in what order, at what time). Different narratological approaches pursue each of these questions. Investigations into the narrated materials commonly seek the elementary units that are common to all narratives: Propp's work on Russian folk tales proposed that there were no more than 31 such basic elements or ‘functions’, and that they always appeared in the same order. Likewise, the French narratologist A. J. Greimas (1917–92) proposed that there are only six basic roles (or ‘actants’) in stories: subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, and opponent. This kind of folkloric analysis has no necessary interest in literary technique. On the other hand, studies of narration, that is, how stories are told, have an obvious relevance to literary fictions. In this field, there is an English‐speaking tradition of narratology, originating in the theory and practice of Henry *James, and codified in terms of narrative ‘point of view’ by his disciple Percy *Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921); other notable early contributions were E. M. *Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927) and Edwin *Muir's The Structure of the Novel (1928). More convincing than these works was The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) by Wayne C. Booth (1921–2005), which introduced important new distinctions such as those between the real author and the ‘implied author’ of a novel, and between reliable and unreliable narrators. The most comprehensive analyses of the various kinds of possible narrator and narrative order appear in the works of the French narratologist Gérard Genette (1930– ), especially his Figures III (1972; partly translated as Narrative Discourse, 1980). See Shlomith Rimmon‐Kenan, Narrative Fiction (2nd edn, 2002).”