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“... One of America’s three most important living novelists – I’ll let you name the other two – has just published one of the best of his novels. Unlike any other first-class novel we’re likely to see this year, Plains Song sings of life on the American plains. To sing, in the 1980s, about life on the American plains does not exactly put one into the mainstream of American letters ...”

“... Wayne Booth begins his new book by recalling how in the early Sixties he and his colleagues at the University of Chicago could ignore the distress of a young black assistant professor, Paul Moses, who declared that he would no longer teach Huckleberry Finn because he found the portrayal of Jim offensive. Booth remembers with more than a twinge of conscience that he and his colleagues found the challenge to Mark Twain’s great novel offensive because it violated ‘academic norms of objectivity ...”

“... The writers are Laurence Lerner, Cedric Watts, Roger Scruton, John Holloway, Gabriel Josipovici, Wayne Booth, Robert Pattison and Anthony Thorlby. Four of them teach at Sussex, so I suppose the book started as a bright idea in the Senior Common Room at Falmer. Some of the essays are genial performances. Josipovici obviously likes Barthes’s work, and ...”

“... Previous books by Wayne C. Booth, especially The Rhetoric of Fiction, have been well received in the academic world. Since it first made its appearance in the early Sixties, The Rhetoric of Fiction has gone on to establish itself as a standard work – a touchstone of sanity. Probably the same thing will happen to the book under review ...”

“... as I know). During my second year at the University of Chicago, I found a class being taught by Wayne Booth. Booth, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep, was one of the more famous members of the English department, and was known to be a good teacher, too. He was also a lapsed Mormon, born in ...”

“... as she has called it, for she recognises certain sharers of her aims: among literary critics, Wayne Booth; among philosophers, Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell; among social scientists, Amartya Sen. Nussbaum explains her discovery of virtues eloquently, volubly, in the manner of a belated Victorian moralist. The reverse of a dry writer, she is ...”

“... as straightforward, unself-conscious or natural. Even when male literary theorists (such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton) have taken an interest in feminist criticism, they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but ...”

“... of the freedom of their dreams, their irrational impulses and desires. Romantic irony is also what Wayne Booth called ‘unstable’ irony, which pushes the reader out of successive moral or philosophical positions and premises. It becomes a literary technique, exploited by Lermontov through the use of multiple narration, and through the many voices and ...”

“... problematic passages by following the principle that I once heard enunciated by the Chicago critic Wayne Booth: ‘Just let me invent the evidence and I’ll prove my point.’ To explain why the Germans were known as ‘Teutsch’, Clüver simply emended the name of the German deity mentioned by Tacitus: ‘now Tuisto had to make room for Teuto.’ Yet ...”

“... interpretation may depend finally on what kind of stability you are looking for. Hirsch, Abrams, Wayne Booth and other opponents of deconstruction have argued that interpretation is inherently unstable because of the difficulty of guessing with certainty what any person may mean or have meant on any occasion, an uncertainty deriving from the fallibility ...”

“... literary critic of his generation’ – but also on outliers of American formalism such as Wayne Booth. He shared interests with near contemporaries such as Tony Tanner while his literary doppelgänger (and closest friend) was Malcolm Bradbury. Like Kermode and Tanner, Lodge was initially receptive to new theoretical ideas coming from ...”

“... status as a feminist classic to compel its imperialist and racist rhetoric to come into the open. Wayne Booth argues that the ‘understanding’ of an author’s intention may be an insufficient goal for interpretation, and posits a process of ‘overstanding’ as the goal of a more ambitious criticism. This ambition is most scandalous when it claims ...”

“... over the success of their trick. They now split Tom’s Fiver ... at the same time as ‘Fatty’ Wayne of the Third splits the best pair of Colts’ batting gloves during pracker at the nets. Another pair is urgently needed. Tom is instructed by the Captain of the School to buy one before the big match against Greyfriars, and also to bring the rest of the ...”

“... missed mixing it with the hard-drinking rabble-rousers, Flynn, Bogart and Sinatra, while John Wayne, with whom he acted in The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit, called him a Communist and offered to explain why he, Wayne, ‘was worth a million per picture’. Hopper was, however, perfectly on time for the upcoming ...”

“... like the most abject stage-door Johnnies, and indeed Janes. The former First Lady sat in the main booth with her friends, looking serene and detached, while all sorts of people took their time collecting their hats or whatever, and rubbernecking shamelessly.What was this? It was more than fame and more than glamour. And it was a bit less than Edmund Burke’s ...”