Booth

[Terrance]

His first book, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), exemplifies the power of
the Aristotelian principle that techniques cannot be properly evaluated
apart from their contribution to a larger purpose, and it sketches an
approach to fiction as rhetoric. In accomplishing the first task, Booth
overturned such dogmas about narration as "showing is better than
telling" and "true art ignores the audience." In accomplishing the
second, he showed that every choice an author makes has consequences for
how the audience will respond to the work's developing representation
and, more generally, for the kind of meeting of minds that can occur
between author and reader. Booth's concern for the way minds can meet
through language and literature unites his otherwise very different 1974
books, A Rhetoric of Irony and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent.
In Irony, he investigates the special nature of communications in which
authors covertly ask audiences to reject the literal meaning of their
utterances and reconstruct their
indirectly expressed meanings. He demonstrates the possibility and
pleasures of
sharing stable ironies--communications whose reconstructions are not
themselves
undercut--and conducts a fascinating, if less conclusive, examination of
unstable
ironies--communications in which no reconstruction is secure. In Modern
Dogma, he
seeks to establish appropriate warrants for giving assent to another's
argument, and
ends by suggesting that giving assent is a more fundamental human act
than
expressing denial. In Critical Understanding (1979) Booth applies the
rhetoric of
assent to the domain of criticism. He proposes a pluralism that rejects
the notion that
all critical statements are equally meritorious even as it insists on
the validity and
importance of multiple questions about literature. Above all, the
pluralism proposes
that our critical discourse honor three enduring values--vitality,
justice, and
understanding--because serving them will best enable critics to engage
in productive
communal discourse. Booth's rhetorical analysis of literary and critical
discourse is
extended in The Company We Keep: Ethical Criticism and the Ethics of
Reading
(1988) and The Vocation of a Teacher: Occasions for Rhetoric 1967-88
(1989)