Vol. 2 No. 6 · 3 April 1980
pages 6-8 | 5053 words
These Staggering Questions
Clive James finds fault with a good writer
- Critical Understanding by Wayne Booth
Chicago, 400 pp, £14.00, September 1979, ISBN 0 226 06554 5
Previous books by Wayne C. Booth, especially The Rhetoric of Fiction, have been well received in the academic world. Since it first made its appearance in the early Sixties, The Rhetoric of Fiction has gone on to establish itself as a standard work – a touchstone of sanity. Probably the same thing will happen to the book under review. Critical Understanding is such a civilised treatise that I felt guilty about being bored stiff by it.
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Letters
Vol. 2 No. 8 · 1 May 1980
From René Weis
SIR: Much as I admire Clive James as a writer and agree whole-heartedly with a lot of what he has to say in his review of Wayne Booth’s Critical Understanding (LRB, Vol.2, No 6), I cannot help taking exception to some of his comments. Writing about PhD students, he claims that ‘in the long run it can’t be good that boys and girls are being encouraged to pontificate on topics about which wise men and women would consider it presumptuous to venture an aphorism.’ Surely this directly contradicts the whole thrust of his ‘anti-heavies’ argument by implying that only the Auerbachs, Curtiuses and Booths of this world are legitimately entitled to comment on the weighty issues confronting us in epoch-making works of art. Whether the ‘boys and girls’ of the PhD programmes are amateurs or not is a matter of some dispute – there have in fact been PhD theses which became seminal works – but even if they were (as James tacitly assumes), they would not therefore automatically forfeit the right to comment meaningfully on issues which more educated minds have despaired over. As James himself writes, ‘it would be a very trivial critic who believed that the real work of appreciation had not already been done, long ago and by nameless amateurs.’
René Weis
London WC1
