My Many Selves: The Quest for a Plausible Harmony

by Wayne C. Booth

Overview

His memoir, My Many Selves, is both an incisive self-examination and a creative approach to retelling his life. Writing his autobiography became a quest to harmonize the diverse, discordant parts of his identity and resolve the conflicts in what he thought and believed. To see himself clearly and whole, he broke his self down, personified the fragments, uncovered their roots in his life, and engaged his multiple identities and experiences in dialogue. Basic to his story and to its lifelong concerns with ethics and rhetoric was his youth in rural Utah. He valued that background, while acknowledging its ambiguous influence on him, and continued to identify himself as Mormon, though he renounced most Latter-day Saint doctrines.

Wayne Booth died in October 2005, soon after completing work on his autobiography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780874215359
Publisher:	Utah State University Press
Publication date:	01/31/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Wayne Booth, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, was one of the most important literary critics and English scholars of recent times. His books included The Rhetoric of Fiction; Now Don't Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age; A Rhetoric of Irony; Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent; Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism; The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction; The Vocation of a Teacher; For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals; The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication; and others. Many of them became required reading in college classrooms.

Table of Contents

Contents Preface Part One My Toughest “Self-Splits” and What Produced Them Chapter One A Devout Mormon Is Challenged by Rival Selves Chapter Two A Pious Moralist Confronts a Cheater Chapter Three The Cheerful Poser Comforts a Griever Chapter Four My Many Selves Confront the Man Who Believes in LOVE Chapter Five Ambition vs. Teaching for the Love of It Chapter Six The Hypocritical Mormon Missionary Becomes a Skillful Masker, and Discovers “Hypocrisy-Upward” Chapter Seven The Puritan Preaches at the Luster While the Hypocrite Covers the Show Chapter Eight The Lover Becomes a Trapped Army Private Chapter Nine An Egalitarian Quarrels Scornfully with a Hypocritical Bourgeois Chapter Ten A College Dean Struggles to Escape Part Two The Splits Multiply—in Somewhat Less Torturous Form Chapter Eleven The Quarrel between the Cheater and the Moralist Produces Gullible-Booth Chapter Twelve A Wandering Generalist Longs to Be a True Scholar Chapter Thirteen A Would-be Novelist Mourns behind the Would-be Lover and Would-be Scholar Chapter Fourteen The Committed Father and Husband, as Lover, Shouts “For Shame!” at All the Other Selves Chapter Fifteen The Man of Peace Tries to Tame the Slugger Interlude A Potpourri of Chapters I Refuse to Write (Let Alone Include) Part Three Aging, Religion, and—Surprise!—the Quest for a Plausible Harmony Chapter Sixteen The Old Fart Debates with a Bunch of Young Booths, While Posing as Younger Than 84 Chapter Seventeen Harmony at Last? Index

Editorial Reviews

Here the life and the form of its telling are integral—the book enacts the very divisions Wayne Booth is talking about, and what he is talking about has shaped the work he has done that has resonated with so many over the years. The honesty here is valuable in itself as people, Mormon or not, recognize their own conflicts that constitute the process of trying to live a better life, an effort we all tend to bungle. So as an autobiography, this is important. As a study in ethics and rhetoric it is important. As an experience of reading it is important—it comes together for the reader at the end in ways that tell the story of any honest life.

Gregory Clark, editor, Rhetoric Society Quarterly

From the Publisher