Booth- So Good yet So Bad

Overall, Wayne Booth’s discussion of literary criticism and ethics is thoughtful and interesting; however, his use of the words “good” and “bad” are troublesome.  For the most part, Booth is just verbalizing what actually happens every time we hear or read an object of discourse—be it a silly vignette or formal oratory— a story will always evoke a response, just as a literary theory will provoke thought.  He asks his audience if the consequences (I assume he means the resulting emotion or idea) of listening to a story are “good or bad” (99).  In using the terms “good” and “bad,” though, Booth severely generalizes his point because the quality of a piece of rhetoric cannot be deemed so.  To define something as good or bad is far too objective.  Using his illustration of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and the resulting increase of suicide, Booth alludes that the work was “bad” because it possibly influenced people to kill themselves (100).  But, doesn’t that mean that the work was also extremely “good”?  If Goethe’s intention was to have people die, that is ethically wrong, but the fact that he succeeded proves Werther to be incredibly good too.  Therein lies the problem- what is good cannot really be deemed good on all levels, just as what is bad cannot be considered completely bad. 

A Horse Called Rhetoric

          The car is a powerful machine, full of energy and potential to accomplish great things.  However, like so many powerful things, a car needs a driver in order to reach its maximum potential.  In his article, The Order of Discourse, Foucault says that from the moment it is created, discourse is immediately “controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed,” by a set of rules dictated by society (1461).  The concept makes sense; words have power, but unless properly presented in the right environment, by the right person, in the right setting, words can lose their power.

          Without the reigns of Order, discourse is a wild beast.  Consider the impact of books like The Feminine Mystique or The Sun Also Rises.  These pieces of rhetoric had a significant impact on the thoughts and actions of people in their time.  However, would they have been as influential if they had been presented in the 1800’s, or even today?  Probably not.  Foucault mentions man’s “will to know,” or “will to truth,” and claims this craving is strengthened by “the way in which knowledge is put to work, valorized, distributed, and in a sense attributed, in a society” (1463).  Society’s rules were being re-shaped during the 1960’s and 1920’s; people were willing to question their lives and the standard of their moral compass. The words of Hemingway and Friedan were “put to work” and helped establish a paradigm shift in the world.  Discourse was tamed to free the minds of America.