Wayne C. Booth Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Milton A. Mays

Critical Essay by Milton A. Mays

Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction has had exceptionally favorable reviews. These reviews, it seems to me, fall into two classes; the merely unintelligent, and the invalid. I say invalid because even those reviews worth reading are somewhat beside the point, in that what they find to praise is mostly Booth's criticism of individual works. His analyses are, admittedly, sometimes very good (although they are sometimes bad as well); but The Rhetoric of Fiction asks to be taken as a contribution to the theory of fiction, not merely as a collection of critical essays. A work of theory must be tested by criteria including the clarity and usefulness of its terminology, the consistency with which terminology is employed, and the logic of the overall argument. In these respects I think that The Rhetoric of Fiction fails. That good criticism can be—we need not say produced by, but only associated with—the...
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