Literary criticism and the pursuit of character.

Abstract

Kathryn Montgomery and I invited Wayne Booth to give the plenary address at the Society for Health and Human Values in the hope that our colleague philosophers, historians, and lawyers would hear--from the most authoritative source possible--that understanding how stories work is central to the work we do. Booth's lecture, reproduced exactly here, was a turning point for the field. For the first time, bioethicists without literary training could grasp with great immediacy and pleasure the point of studying literature. This lecture was a beginning of a generative interest within bioethics in such technical literary interests as point of view and reader-response criticism. By having reached our colleagues with such clarity and élan, Professor Booth opened an era in bioethics attuned to narrative theory, literary texts, and the joys of reading.