Professor Booth has written [Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism] in a relaxed, personal, and occasionally self-indulgent style, and I shall discuss it in the same tone. He concludes his book with "A Hippocratic Oath for the Pluralist," which ends with the notion that if the critical community used his "five simple ordinances, we would write and read only about one-fourth as many critical words." I would say about one-tenth. (p. 429)

Briefly in his ordinances and at length in his first chapter, Booth discusses not understanding other critical works adequately, with the result that attacks are constantly being made upon straw men. Quite true, and I should like to glance at what he does to a critic whose work I know quite well, though not as well as I should—myself. "… Bayley, along with Morse Peckham, Paul de Man, and dozens of others, seek disunities…." I...