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 most inadequate of theoretical preconceptions will not, of course surprise anyone very old in the game, although it will always be a cause of despair to the aesthetically pure of mind.
The Rhetoric of Fiction is dedicated to Ronald Crane, and acknowledges as its basis the "critical pluralism" of Richard McKeon. Some readers have apparently considered this work to have all the strengths and none of the weaknesses of the Chicago school. Without any comment on the strengths of that school, I would say that the degree to which this work embodies the characteristic weaknesses of the Chicago school is in fact rather striking.
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