Now Don't Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous AgeIn this entertaining collection of essays, Wayne Booth looks for the much-maligned “middle ground” for reason—a rhetoric that can unite truths of the heart with truths of the head and allow us all to discover shared convictions in mutual inquiry. First delivered as lectures in the 1960s, when Booth was a professor at Earlham College and the University of Chicago, Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me still resounds with anyone struggling for consensus in a world of us versus them. “Professor Booth’s earnestness is graced by wit, irony, and generous humor.”—Louis Coxe, New Republic |
Contents
I THE NEW CREDULITY AND THE NEW RHETORIC | 3 |
II OF THE RATIONAL PERSUASION | 79 |
III THE LAST TRUE CHURCH | 173 |
IV IRONIES AND THE NEW SCIENCE OF IRONOLOGY | 265 |
V LAST DAYS | 343 |
Common terms and phrases
American Araby argument Aristotle artistic Artsman audience authority believe Bookmaker called censor Chicago claim commitment course creative critic dean defense discover Earlham College effect Elder Olson emotional example existence experience fact faculty feel fiction finally Finnegans Wake future genuine Goodman graduate human ideas intellectual Joyce Killham kind Laurence Sterne law of noncontradiction least literary literature live logical look matter mean ment mind moral never notion novel obviously ontological proof opinions perhaps persuasion philosophical Plato Poetics principles problem Professor prove question rational readers reason rhetoric Rhetoric of Fiction Ronald Crane scholarship seems sense simply society Sterne story sure T. S. Eliot talk teachers teaching tell thing Thomas Mann thought tion Tristram Shandy true truth University of Chicago values Vietnam whole words writing wrong