This is disorganized and just throwing stuff at the wall. Maybe some day when there is nothing else to do....

This was my second rodeo with a couple of decades between. I just wanted to see how Booth's book has stood up over time (or, maybe, I have). Critical Understanding was written at a time when theory dogs roamed the halls of graduate English departments and there was a kind of religiosity (fanaticism?) that crept into the voices of professors of critical theory when they were critiquing the works/beliefs of their peers/competitors. When Booth threw this book into the ring, most heavyweight critics were having too much fun clawing at other's throats to take seriously Booth's belief in the possibility of 'understanding' or of the existence of 'common interpretive ground' just over the horizon. (As for the bulk of the professoriate, those teaching real literature rather than theory books in their classrooms, they believed their brethren who had gone down the theory road had already lost their marbles and were in critical condition. While these misguided colleagues were emphatic and loud and sexy, they were pretty much an anomaly, irrelevant in the larger scheme of teaching good books to serious-minded apprentices.)

As for what Booth was selling? It is, finally, a very pragmatic approach to reading and interpretation, pragmatic in the sense of old-school Dewyian pragmatism and not that far afield from the bulk of new-school Rortyian pragmatism. When I arrived at the point in the book where Booth performs his reveal, I was hanging on by my fingernails, ready to close the book for the last time and to put it in the box designated to be donated to the local hospice store. There are, after all, just too many other irrelevancies competing for my time.

So, in the end, Critical Understanding offers nothing really startling but something rather sensible that, I think, stands up better than most of what was written back in those heady times. Booth--like Davidson telling us that most of what we believe must be correct/true--assures us that despite opinions to the contrary, there is an awful lot of understanding going on out there, but, even more importantly, that understanding, surprise!, is a very useful thing, especially in relation to the future, in relation to what we are able to become, and the world we hope to bring into being. Isn't this what all of our conversations, talking, arguing is about? Isn't the attempt to win agreement about the nature of the text, the poem, the audience, the object, the past really about finding ground from which to move into a certain kind of future? It is not about driving immovable stakes in solid rock to stabilize forever the text, the poem, the audience, the object, our history, to end all deviation that jeopardizes critical progress. Unfortunately, stake driving sucked up a lot of the energy of the theory movement, and bred a whole generation of graduate disciples tethered to those stakes. This was what drove philosophy departments not only to look down their long noses at their colleagues across the quad, but finally to pronounce them as lost souls. (Ironically, it is difficult to see and unwise to call out the follies of others with an analytic/scholastic mote in one's own eye.)

Booth is honest and, clearly, a hard worker. He attacks his job like a miner facing a mountain with a chisel. It is, in fact, hard to get past all of his hard work. Booth says that critical understanding must take into account the sophistication and complexity of an opponent's argument. Granted. But I felt that during each reading of Booth's work there was too much sophistication, too much complexity, and too much hard work. Critical Understanding could have been a really good article and I am at a loss to see what would have been lost. ( )