In this section I’ll borrow from works by the Literary Theorist, Wayne C. Booth of the University of Chicago, to consider a positive and reasonable stance we can take toward the question of how we create meaning and also evaluate literary works. We will be mindful of the ethical dimension of our critical perspective on texts but also wary of the specter of censorship that looms over the ethical evaluation of literary works.
What is ‘coduction’?
In contrast to a deductive statement, a ‘coduction’ is a localized evaluation of literature in conversation with others, tempered by new understandings over time.
As a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, I helped to summarize the works of Wayne Booth in a project called, Booth’s Rhetorology. I won’t go into depth about his work here, but you can read the summary of Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep, where he coins the term ‘coduction’ to distinguish the way we evaluate literature.
Coductions are localized evaluations of literary works that are “relative in time, in relation to our accumulated experience: a child reading Moby Dick, or a grown up reading a comic book, may have too little or too much experience to appreciate the text and match the role of the implied audience.”