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/ once had a student who wrote a paper about the joys of deer hunting, including a vivid description of the thrill
that "coursed through" his veins as
he cut the deer's throat and watched
the Ufe dying in those "large, beautiful, child-like eyes." It was evident to
me that he was satirizing blood sport.
But I found, in what seems now to
have been one of the most ineffectual
conferences I have ever had with a
student, that my ironic reading was to
him plain crazy. 1 made the mistake
of lingering over his bloodthirsty
phrases, trying to explain to him why
I had thought them ironic. But he was
simply baffled, as well he might be; to
read irony into any one of his statements was to misunderstand his entire perception of what his life and the
deer's were all about. Wrestling with
irony, he and 1 were not talking only
about "verbal" matters; we were
driven into debate about how a man
should live.
Things get still worse if we indeterminately wonder: Suppose Booth had been
correct in assuming that the passage
was intended to be read ironically;
might it not, even so, be worth examining for possible suspect traces of the
student's attitude? But speculations of
that sort are not Booth's concern. By
"rhetoric" he has in mind the ways
NOW IN PAPERBACK!
*^-"
THE BRILLIANT BESTSELLER ABOUT WASHINGTON.
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No Recovery
THE N E W REPUBLIC
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