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's writing is careful and lucid. But his book stretches over far too many pages, as he tediously returns to the same arguments in favor of a "limited pluralism," and, in the final chapters, offers critiques of texts by James, Goldsmith, and others that make simple points at great length. And the pace is not quickened by Booth's odd tics and mannerisms …, which attempt playfulness and stylistic self-consciousness, but which strike me as forced, pretentious, and often downright silly. In setting out the "plurality of modes" as a critical problem, Booth discusses Auden's "Surgical Ward," laying out a number of possible ways to interpret it. More than a hundred pages into the book, Booth is still worrying this mildly interesting poem to death and anxiously talking about the various critical "languages" that could apply to it. No-where is Booth's organizational difficulty more evident than in his choice of representative "pluralists." Ronald Crane, Kenneth Burke and M. H. Abrams are examined in separate chapters, their writings explored in order to show, first, the different pluralisms available to us, and second, the impossibility of harmonizing them "into a single intellectual world."… Crane receives sixty pages, while Burke gets half that amount—a proportion that seems to me exactly wrong. I respect Booth's devotion to Crane as his former teacher, but in re-reading The Languages of Criticism and the Structure or Poetry and the two-volume Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays, I find Crane's work to have dated badly…. [His] concern for "precision" in our critical languages leads in his own work to some very pompous, deadeningly dull writing. Crane's analyses of other critics' arguments and literary texts are labored, moving like a glacier as they self-importantly affirm their status as 'serious thinking' (the real thing). Burke, on the other hand, is a marvelously inventive critic and theorist, whose writings have not received the attention they deserve. As Booth rightly comments in a footnote, the admirers of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and recent continental critics might be surprised to discover the range, subtlety, and originality of books like The Philosophy of Literary Form and A Rhetoric of Motives. But the point is that Booth's stimulating remark does not belong in a lonely footnote at the back of Critical Understanding. Burke's work is wonderfully rich and relevant today, but Booth plods along in his chapter about Burke-as-pluralist, missing opportunities and once more speculating about "Surgical Ward."

There are, I believe, other stylistic and tactical problems in Critical Understanding. Booth's heavy-handed use of "warfare" and "killing" as metaphors for critical debate is, to my mind, irresponsible. And when he refers to Barthes, Stanley Fish, and others, he usually misunderstands or distorts their positions…. For some reason, Booth decided not to treat Barthes's writing in detail, even though his work (as Booth notes himself) is extremely influential today—certainly more so than R. S. Crane, for example. Barthes, Derrida, Fish, J. Hillis Miller, and Paul De Man foster the "relativism" and "skepticism" that Booth finds so disturbing, yet none of them is studied at any length. At one point, Booth lumps together all of these critics (except for De Man) in a single paragraph, summing up their views in a sentence apiece…. This is simply unfair, and it is unlikely to persuade readers that Booth grasps the full meaning and import of what he obviously dislikes. A few pages later, Booth states that critics regularly fail to do justice to one another's work, and he refers to his own page 216 as an example—which leads me not to commend Booth's honesty, but to wonder why he boldly breaks a law of which he is well aware.

Booth's previous books addressed real, significant problems, such as rhetorical techniques in fiction and definitions of irony. But Critical Understanding concerns itself with problems that are badly formulated at the outset, and that result in the wrong kind of analytical procedures and strategies. (pp. 167-69)

Booth's vision of things, it seems to me, is quite mistaken. First, he ignores the extent to which critical "conflict," far from being "meaningless," is profoundly meaningful, testifying both to the richness of literary texts and to the power of critical discourse to generate new, provocative interpretations. Critics like De Man and Harold Bloom are, in Booth's terms, "monistic," and they are surely too preoccupied with their own interests and rhetorical flights. But their writings have clearly enriched our "understanding" of the Romantic tradition, irony, allegory, and particular texts. "Strong" and "exclusivist" readings do not necessarily close down or prohibit critical exchange, but rather extend and vitalize it.

But there is an even more fundamental objection to Booth's argument. Astonishingly, he nowhere examines the social and institutional force of literary studies, and this omission from the pages of Critical Understanding may suggest why the book is so misguided, so dedicated to answering questions that no one has been asking. We teach and produce our criticism within an institution, and as Frank Kermode and Jonathan Culler have argued, our work is (contrary to Booth) thereby "limited" and controlled; there are many different modes of criticism, but surprising family resemblances to be discerned among them, and also general agreement about the rules of critical decorum…. Like others before him, Booth seriously underestimates the power of the institution (for better or worse) to dictate procedures, to determine what will or will not be allowed as a critical statement, and to absorb what professes to challenge it. (pp. 169-70)

Criticism is produced for many reasons, not all of them ennobling. Anyone who complains about "meaningless critical conflict" and the glut of publications needs only to glance at the next MLA job-list to see what departments are now expecting of prospective junior faculty. Hiring, tenure, promotion, grants—for senior and junior faculty alike—depend primarily upon publication. This is, of course, no great news, but as a factor in accounting for the state of literary criticism, it is conspicuously absent from Critical Understanding. Booth may be right to deplore the numbers of "critical languages" that are being spoken today, but they are the result of social, economic, and institutional facts: inflation has hit the academy hard. Yet while much of the critical writing is bad, a great deal of it is excellent—stimulating, valuable, and part of a "fruitful exchange." Criticism remains "meaningful" in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Critical Understanding, however, does not help us in perceiving either the ways or the reasons. (p. 170)