For the Love of It – Amateuring and Its Rivals (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) - Hardcover

Booth, Wayne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226065855 ISBN 13: 9780226065854

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1999

Synopsis

Why would anyone spend free hours and weekends on a demanding practice that promises no payoff in money, fame, or power? Is it true that anything worth doing is worth doing only if you can get credit for doing it really well? Why do amateurs do what they do? Wayne Booth found himself enticed by these questions after taking up the cello at age 31 and then experiencing decades not just of unforeseen struggle but of comic and humiliating disasters - followed by hours of astonishing bliss playing chamber music. This book tells the story not only of this intimate struggle between man and cello but also of the larger struggle between a society obsessed with success and payoff and individuals who choose challenging hobbies that yield no payoff except the love of it. This fundamental opposition leads Booth into diverse meditations on how amateuring relates to all other loves and pleasures. In his celebration of how the amateur's labouring can blossom, he thus joins a long line of thinkers who have puzzled over the meanings of "fun", "work" and "love."

About this title

About the Author

<div><b>Wayne C. Booth</b> (1921&#8211;2005) was the George Pullman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. His many books include <i>The Rhetoric of Fiction</i>,<i> A Rhetoric of Irony</i>,<i> The Power and Limits of Pluralism</i>, <i>The Vocation of a Teacher</i>, and <i>For</i><i>the Love of It</i>, all published by the University of Chicago Press.</div>

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226065855
• ISBN 13: 9780226065854
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 248