[The following is a primary concern in The Rhetoric of Fiction]: How does the writer of fiction (and Professor Booth does not ignore types of fiction other than the novel, though most of his book is about novels) ensure that the reader takes the intended view of his story? But there are, of course, other questions to be got out of the way before this central question can be asked: for example, we must consider the case of the writer who denies that he intends the reader to take a particular view of his stor...

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 contributio...

In the past The Rhetoric of Fiction has been properly enough read mostly as a work about prose fiction, but the book's importance is such as to warrant an attempt at "placing" it according to its general critical and theoretical orientation. Although this procedure may seem to risk forcing Booth into a Neo-Aristotelian bed of Procrustes, it will actually turn out to provide a way of assessing his originality and independence. The late R. S. Crane has referred to The Rhetoric of Fiction ...

[In the past], vigorous debates about what criticism is and ought to have been conducted under the rules of sporting competition: each combatant plays to win and the victors believe they deserve their laurels. What is noteworthy about the present scene is not only the unprecedented multiplicity and strangeness of criticisms but the resultant resignation: that is, the widespread conviction that somehow we must come to amicable terms with all of them and find some intelligible way of acknowledging that they a...

Even though Wayne Booth claims only a secondary concern for critical theory, [The Rhetoric of Irony] is bound to interest us because of the importance of his Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) and of his stature as an elder statesman of the educational institution. In his preface he … denies being an Aristotelian, sheds doubt on the category "Chicago Critics," rejects general systems or critical schools, and declares himself, in private at least, "an addicted ironist." All of this...

[A Rhetoric of Irony] is a good book. It quotes a number of long examples, arguing from them in detail "how we manage to share ironies and why we often do not," with mild discouragement for current follies on the subject; and the literary judgments (as apart from philosophical or historical ones) seem to me right every time…. I found it all the more extraordinary that what I had long thought "irony" to mean does not get mentioned at all. The basic situation for the trope o...

This review violates the first commandment of book reviewing: do not criticize an author for failing to give us a book he never intended to write. But I see no getting around the fact that Wayne Booth's Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism is misconceived. In my judgment, it is over-written, organized on highly questionable lines, and committed to solving problems that do not exist, at least not in the terms which Booth uses to describe them. From one page to the next, Booth�...

Everything is to be said for working patiently through the stages of one's subject, especially when one's subject has been as shabbily done as Wayne Booth's. What, after all, exists explicitly and directly on the subject of irony, a subject so dominant in the critical writing on modern literature that, as Booth points out [in A Rhetoric of Irony], vast numbers of articles, dissertations, and books in the last thirty years have had "irony" in their titles?… Compare t...

Wayne Booth wants literary critics to be pluralists, not champions of a single method. A pluralist believes that "two or more conflicting positions may be entirely acceptable" but that many other positions are wrong; truth is plural but nevertheless there is truth. Critical Understanding investigates the criticism of three professed pluralists, R. S. Crane, Kenneth Burke, and M. H. Abrams, to see whether pluralism is possible. Are they, in fact, pluralists, or only disguised monists? Can Booth...

Professor Booth has written [Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism] in a relaxed, personal, and occasionally self-indulgent style, and I shall discuss it in the same tone. He concludes his book with "A Hippocratic Oath for the Pluralist," which ends with the notion that if the critical community used his "five simple ordinances, we would write and read only about one-fourth as many critical words." I would say about one-tenth. (p. 429) Briefly in his ordinanc...

[The Rhetoric of Fiction] makes good the claim on the dust jacket that it offers "the most significant analysis of the novelist's art" since Percy Lubbock's Craft of Fiction. But it differs from that classic study, indeed from much of the criticism of fiction which it ably surveys, in that it is written with no overspecific commitment. Whereas since Lubbock there has been a tendency to be more Jamesian than James, the present study shows a catholic taste and a practical empiricis...

Professor Booth spends some time on the definition of irony [in A Rhetoric of Irony]: it is present, according to his account, when the surface meaning of a passage must be rejected, and another, incongruous, and "higher" meaning must be reached by reconstructing the evidence. He finds unacceptable any definition which is too wide to be specifically useful; such as Cleanth Brooks's in The Well Wrought Urn, where irony is "the most general term we have for the kind of qualificatio...

Wayne C. Booth avoids anchoring his argument in the needs of criticism at the present time, but his fascination with critical freedom explains why he has to justify pluralism in [Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism]. Pluralism, as he defines it, does not resolve critical disagreements but gives them meaning. Against relativists like [Stanley] Fish, Booth argues that some reading may be wrong; against monists, he counters that more than one reading may be right…. Booth wants not...

It is gratifying to read so calm and academically mellow a book [as A Rhetoric of Irony] in days like these when so much is hurried and harried and always going awry. But A Rhetoric of Irony is hard to review. For besides its saying so much so well, the appeal of the subject matter makes the reviewer, like Jimmy Durante's everybody, want to get into the act…. By "rhetoric" [Booth] has in mind the ways whereby the use of irony establishes a bond of "communion" betwee...

Anyone who has written so useful a book as The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) deserves an especially attentive audience from readers of this journal. But rhetoricians looking into Now Don't Try to Reason with Me … will moderate their admiration for Booth's courage in taking up the big questions with a familiar disappointment that the questions go, once more, unanswered. Things get under way briskly enough with the announcement that the author's concern is to renew the force of reason...

[Wayne Booth does not predict in Now Don't Try to Reason with Me] how the great confrontation [between those who want to capture the universities and those who want to continue to hold them] will turn out. The revolutionaries' ammunition is inexhaustible, their potential numerical superiority overwhelming, and the fuel to feed their motives plentiful and explosive. The academic establishment's weapons (like those of the law) are few and cumbersome, its positions and strongholds almost u...

In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent Booth engages the modern mind and its dualisms. It is an exciting book, not in the way that it proceeds—though much expanded, it suffers in several ways from its original lecture format—but in its good news. (p. xxxiv) Booth does not attempt to establish an epistemology or even, despite the systematic appearance of the book, a systematic rhetoric…. What he attempts is to reestablish as intellectually respectable, roughly under the classical rhe...