Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44549 in Books
• Published on: 1983-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 572 pages

Customer Reviews

expand your appreciation of fiction
This thoughtful, probing exploration of how fiction is narrated will make you a better reader and a better writer.

The title's reference to "rhetoric of fiction" makes this book sound obscure and academic, but I found Booth's inquiry into fictional "rhetoric"--that is, the techniques used by authors to persuade readers to accept what they are reading--accessible and insightful. Starting from the old "show vs. tell" debate of fiction-writing (the relative merits of presenting action directly vs. summarizing and explaining), Booth points out that storytelling has always involved the artifice of the author's giving the reader information, as of the inner nature of a character, that is not available to us in real life. We accept the biblical narrator's description of Job as a man who is perfect, upright, and who eschews evil, when we would never accept any such statements made by one living person about another.

Taking examples from a variety of works, from "The Odyssey" to "The Decameron" to "Emma" to "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Booth shows how writers' approaches to narration have evolved to the 20th-century situation of authors' attempts to efface the narrator altogether and give the impression that the narrator is not providing any point of view at all (Booth thinks this effort hasn't exactly worked--at least, not without large and perhaps unintended tradeoffs). A recurring touchstone in the book is Henry James, who Booth feels is a particular master of the subtleties of narration and its authority.

Booth is clearly a knowledgeable and perceptive reader, but his tone is common-sense and reader-friendly. He is not an ivory-tower lecturer; he comes across as someone who loves fiction and who enjoys delving into its mysteries. He is disarmingly candid about the lack of critical consensus on just about any aspect of literature, and what this implies about its so-called experts.

Of course, the more of the works you have read that he discusses, the more you can get out of the discussion, although I enjoyed reading about works I had not yet read, and indeed Booth's appreciation of them encouraged me to read some I might not have otherwise (in my case, Jane Austen's "Emma").

One of my main recurring thoughts in reading this book was, "Hm, I never thought about that..." This is a critical work that does not kill works of art through analysis, but rather stimulates a heightened appreciation by looking at new subtleties in fiction. My relationship with fiction--a relationship that is very important to me--was deepened by reading this book.

Every book expresses a set of values
Booth wrote this excellent work to counter the notion that readers can enjoy a novel purely on aesthetic grounds, without regard to the meaning of the book. He counters the notion that meaning does not matter or that it is possible to write without meaning. The book is a response to the theory of deconstructionism. Booth makes the point that every novel expresses an idea of what the author thinks is right and what the author thinks is wrong, even if the author denies any such intention. Many modern works, such as those by Camus, for instance, seem at first reading to be completely bare of endorsing any values. I don't believe in good or bad, they may appear to be saying. But upon closer examination, we see that Camus tells the reader that art is good or that feeling or being alive is good. So he does have a value system. Modern authors may claim that they do not take sides or that they are purely relativistic. But in the end, they all show that they value one thing over another thing. Many modern writers who deny having values turn out in reality to value tolerance or freedom.

Everyone who reads Pride and Prejudice agrees that the author is telling us that it is good that Elizabeth gave up her prejudice and that Darcy gave up his pride. Even if there is a reader who does not agree with such sentiments, he or she cannot deny that Austen does express those sentiments.

Having made the point that a writing must express a value system, Booth goes on to ask what kind of values books generally endorse. He finds that writers almost universally endorse what most of us understand to be the good and dislike what we understand to be the bad. At one point, Booth asks if someone had written an excellent book from the viewpoint of a nazi officer for whom the end of the Third Reich was a tragedy, a book with wonderful language, sentence construction, imagery, etc. would we like it as much as we like Hamlet. Would we regard the fate of the nazi officer, death at the hands of allied troops, as great a tragedy as the fate of Hamlet? Unlikely. And what about a reader who knew nothing about the nazis? What if the writer said that he was not endorsing the nazi viewpoint but was careful not to state that explicitly. Would a description of nazi beliefs or actions be enough to make them repugnant to the reader? Booth's answer is no. He believes that unless the context has a definite message - this is bad (or good)- the writer cannot rely on the reader coming to that conclusion, no matter what the writer puts down on paper. Recording the action say, of putting people in death camps, will not necessarily lead to the conclusion that such is a bad action. The writer, including writers who deny any such intent, guides the reader in what and how to think. (I don't remember Booth talking about it, but has not Gone with the Wind for many decades given readers the impression that slavery was not that bad?)

Booth does not believe that it is possible to record a purely neutral action. Every word that is put to paper stakes out one position or another.

Booth provides a masterly discussion of how literature affects the reader.
Many people, the people among us that apparently have the highest IQs, deny any connection between values and art, much less morality and art. But Booth points out how we feel when we read a book that does not endorse our values. We feel repugnance. Many readers, for instance, find it hard to like Mansfield Park. They find it hard to accept that Austen is endorsing the conservative scheme of morality in the book.

All in all, Booth shows us, in very clear language, how fiction works.

Lit Crit Text
Excellent, well-written work that is extremely helpful for the lit crit to understand the relationships between author, projected author/author persona, narrator, characters, and reader. It is extremely comprehensive and (usually) balances and objective that also reads fairly quickly.