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 to discourage variety but to foster it; the richness of literature calls for diversity in interpretation.

Booth's defense of pluralism, however, has a hard time getting off the ground or, more precisely, finding ground on which to stand. He needs to demonstrate the objective complexity of literature without lapsing into a monistic overview that subordinates less complete perspectives to itself. Put differently, without holding all criticism accountable to a monolithic standard, he needs to formulate criteria that allow us to test the adequacy of different approaches. Booth poses this problem at the end of his first chapter, only to turn from it to a lucid discussion of three other pluralists: R. S. Crane, Kenneth Burke, and M. H. Abrams. (pp. 678-79)

Rather than solve the dilemma raised in Booth's first chapter, the discussion of Crane, Burke, and Abrams seems at first to compound it. In each case, ostensibly supra-modal criteria bear the imprint of a particular mode: Burke's emphasis on fluidity, for example, reflects his interest in symbolic action just as Abrams' concern for narrative coherence stems from his interest in literary history. What is worse, the critics Booth calls on to defend critical understanding cannot seem to agree with each other. Even when Burke and Crane use the same terms (like poetic structure), they mean different things by them. Although Booth claims to reproduce the views of Burke, he imposes on them his own Chicago-style terministic grid (or so Burke protests in a reply that Booth includes). Each critic, in short, resists restatement in the terms of the others; the modes they represent seem to occupy incommensurable positions in a literary universe that no one can map.

For Booth, however, the irreducibility of these modes does not compromise their value, which he proceeds to defend on practical, not cognitive, grounds…. Booth is not relying on strong feeling to compensate for intellectual failure, though readers who fence off convictions from knowledge will surely make this charge. In Now Don't Try to Reason with Me (1970) and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (1974) he argues persuasively against this separation of rational argument from moral commitment. Critical Understanding again shows not only that we can debate the consequences of different kinds of inquiry but that we must.

According to Booth, pluralism serves three inseparable values: vitality, justice, and understanding. The health of criticism depends on the "vitality of many individual critics with a sense of common enterprise"; in Booth's scheme, "my continual vitality as critic depends, finally, on yours." Critics vitalize criticism when they include others in a community of inquiry, not when they search for ways of elevating themselves at someone else's expense. Justice similarly demands that we judge ourselves by the standards we apply to others, while understanding requires that we try to grasp other viewpoints. Each value, pursued by itself, leads to "absurd excesses," but taken together they transform a shouting match into a community. (pp. 679-80)

Critical Understanding leaves us, then, not with a description of literature but with guidelines for discovering its richness. We cannot know whether literary works are still worth discussing unless we try to discuss them with diverse critics whose commitment to vitality, justice, and understanding allows truths about literature to emerge. (p. 680)