Wayne C. Booth R.I.P.

Glad to see that the New York Times featured a fairly lengthy write-up about the death of the literary critic Wayne C. Booth Monday morning. (Glad too that they didn't do a hatchet job on him the way they did to Jacques Derrida.)In my opinion, Booth's A Rhetoric of Irony is a book that every contemporary literary critic should read. His distinction between stable and unstable ironies provides a useful heuristic for beginning to unpack the paradoxes involved in attempting to interpret modern and postmodern texts that present readers with communicative aporias that seem to endorse a nihilistic vision of a meaningless universe.