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{{Short description|American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual (born 1938)}} | |||
'''Stanley Fish''' (born ]) is a prominent American ] and legal scholar. He was born and raised in ]. He is among the most important critics of the English poet ] in the 20th century, and is often associated with ], at times to his irritation. He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a Professor of Law at ], in ], and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the ]. Professor Fish has also taught at the ], ], and ]. He is the author of 10 books. Fish describes himself as an ]. | |||
{{BLP sources| date= September 2015}} | |||
{{Use mdy dates|date=August 2013}} | |||
{{Infobox academic | |||
| name = Stanley Eugene Fish | |||
| birth_date = {{birth date and age|1938|04|19}} | |||
| birth_place = ] | |||
| occupation = {{Hlist|Literary theorist|legal scholar|author|professor}} | |||
| spouse = ] | |||
| education = {{Unbulleted list|] (]) |] (], ])}}}} | |||
'''Stanley Eugene Fish''' (born April 19, 1938) is an American ], ], ] and ]. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at ]'s ] in New York City.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.cardozo.yu.edu/directory/stanley-fish | title=Stanley Fish | publisher=Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law | date=2013 | access-date=November 1, 2015}}</ref> Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at ] and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the ]. | |||
Fish is associated with ], although he views himself instead as an advocate of ].<ref>Baldacchino, Joseph. ''Humanitas''. {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080515235159/http://www.nhinet.org/jb-seat.htm |date=May 15, 2008 }}</ref> He is also viewed as having influenced the rise and development of ]. | |||
==Academic career== | |||
Fish did his undergraduate work at the ] and earned his Ph.D. from ] in ]. He taught English at the University of California at ] and ] before becoming Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at ] from 1986 to 1998. From 1999 to 2004 he was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the ], where he was paid $230,000 a year, more than the Governor of Illinois. He also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice, and was Chair of the Religious Studies Committee . During his tenure there, he recruited "big name" professors and garnered a lot of attention for the College . After resigning as dean in a high level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC , Fish spent a year teaching in the Department of English. The Institute for the Humanities at UIC named a lecture series in his honor, which is still ongoing . In June of ], he accepted the position of Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at ], teaching in the ]. | |||
During his career he has also taught at the ], ], ], ], ], ], ], and ]. | |||
==Milton== | |||
Stanley Fish started his career as a medievalist. Despite this, his first book, published by Yale University Press in 1965, was on the Renaissance poet ]. Fish reveals in his partly biographical essay, "Milton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour" (published in ''There's No Such Thing as Free Speech... And It's a Good Thing, Too''), that he came to Milton by accident. In 1963 — the same year that Fish started as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley — the resident Miltonist, C.A. Patrides, received a grant. The chair of the department asked Fish to teach the Milton course, notwithstanding the fact that the young professor "had never — either as an undergraduate or in graduate school — taken a Milton course" (269). The eventual result of that course was ''Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost'' (1967; rpt. 1997). Fish's 2001 book, ''How Milton Works'', reflects five decades' worth of his scholarship on Milton. | |||
==Early life and education== | |||
==Interpretive communities== | |||
Fish was born in ].<ref>{{cite web|title=Guide to the Stanley Fish Papers|url=http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt08701714/|access-date=August 25, 2013|website=Online Archive of California}}</ref> He was raised Jewish.<ref name="Tribune">{{cite news|last=McLane|first=Maureen|date=March 21, 1999|title=Stanley Fish: Paradox 101|newspaper=Chicago Tribune|url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/1999/03/21/stanley-fish-paradox-101/|access-date=August 25, 2013}}</ref> His father, an immigrant from ], was a plumber and contractor who made it a priority for his son to get a university education.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Fish|first=Stanley|date=2008-11-02|title=Max the Plumber|url=https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/max-the-plumber/|access-date=2021-03-31|website=Opinionator|publisher=The New York Times}}</ref><ref name="Tribune" /> Fish became the first member of his family to attend college in the US, earning a ] from the ] in 1959 and an ] from ] in 1960.<ref name="Law.fiu.edu">{{cite web|title=Stanley Fish|url=https://law.fiu.edu/directory/stanley-fish/|access-date=March 31, 2021|website=FIU Law}}</ref><ref>''The Journal of Blacks In Higher Education'' No. 30 (Winter, 2000-2001), pp. 44-46. </ref> He completed his ] in 1962, also at ].<ref name="Law.fiu.edu" /> | |||
As a literary theorist, Fish is best known for his analysis of ] — an offshoot of ]. Fish's work in this field examines how the interpretation of a ] is dependent upon each reader's own subjective experience in one or more communities, each of which is defined as a 'community' by a distinct epistemology. For Fish, a large part of what renders a reader’s subjective experience valuable—that is, why it may be considered “constrained” as opposed to an uncontrolled and idiosyncratic assertion of the self—comes from a concept native to the field of linguistics called ''linguistic competence''. In Fish’s source the term is explained as “the idea that it is possible to characterize a linguistic system that every speaker shares.”<ref>Wardaugh, Ronald. Reading: a Linguistic Perspective. University of Michigan: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969. 36, 60.</ref> In the context of literary criticism, Fish uses this concept to argue that a reader’s approach to a text is not completely subjective, and that an internalized understanding of language shared by the native speakers of that given language makes possible the creation of normative boundaries for one’s experience with language. | |||
==Academic career== | |||
Although Fish argues that the only possible meaning of a text is what the author intends, he claims that any actual attempt to access this is not possible. Any attempt to determine what exactly the author intended will result in nothing more than an interpretation based upon the interpretive community of the reader making the interpretation. Fish distinguishes the former as an epistemological point about what texts mean, whereas the latter is a sociological one about how claims about those meanings are produced. | |||
Fish taught English at the ] and ] before serving as Arts and Sciences Professor of English and professor of law at ] from 1986 to 1998. From 1999 to 2004, he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the ], and he served as distinguished visiting professor at the ] from 2000 until 2002.<ref name="Law.fiu.edu"/> Fish also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice and was the chairman of the Religious Studies Committee.<ref>{{cite web|last=Lynn|first=Andrea|date=October 6, 2004|title=Experts in the humanities to discuss future of their discipline|url=http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/04/1006humanities.html|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080907064206/http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/04/1006humanities.html|archive-date=September 7, 2008|access-date=August 25, 2013|website=News Bureau|publisher=University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign|df=mdy-all}}</ref> | |||
During his tenure there, he recruited professors respected in the academic community, and attracted attention to the college.<ref>{{cite web|last=Jaschik|first=Scott|date=February 11, 2005|title=Life After Stanley|url=http://insidehighered.com/workplace/2005/02/11/chicago2_11|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060505143018/http://insidehighered.com/workplace/2005/02/11/chicago2_11|archive-date=May 5, 2006|website=Inside Higher Ed}}</ref> After resigning as dean in a high-level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC,<ref>{{cite web|date=October 31, 2003|title=Privatizing the Public|url=http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000328.html|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20031218023346/http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000328.html|archive-date=December 18, 2003|website=Invisible Adjunct}}</ref> Fish spent a year teaching in the Department of English. The Institute for the Humanities at UIC named a lecture series in his honor, which is still ongoing.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.uic.edu/depts/huminst/stanley.shtml|title=The Stanley Fish Lecture|publisher=University of Illinois at Chicago|date=April 13, 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070427021301/http://www.uic.edu/depts/huminst/stanley.shtml|archive-date=April 27, 2007|url-status=dead}}</ref> In June 2005, he accepted the position of Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at ], teaching in the ]. | |||
A number of Fish’s essays on the topic of interpretive communities are collected in Is There a Text In This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980). In the introduction Fish claims that the constant shifting of the “set of problems” presented by literary theory have forced him to re-evaluate his arguments regarding the specific question, “‘Is the reader or the text the source of meaning?’” | |||
In November 2010 he joined the board of visitors of ], a start-up institution in Savannah, Georgia.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.ralston.ac|title=Collegium Ralstonianum apud Savannenses - Home|publisher=Ralston.ac|access-date=August 25, 2013}}</ref> He has also been a Fellow of the ] since 1985.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.amacad.org/members/classList.pdf|title=List of Active Members by Class|publisher=American Academy of Arts & Sciences|date=November 12, 2012|access-date=August 25, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111005034430/http://www.amacad.org/members/classList.pdf|archive-date=October 5, 2011|url-status=dead}}</ref> | |||
Fish spends the remainder of the introduction reproachfully recalling the various pitfalls and complications of his own thoughts and arguments in the ten years preceding the book’s publication. In particular, the dichotomy of reader autonomy versus autonomy of the text encapsulates most of Fish’s difficulties. If he were to lend too much authority to the text with claims that it already contains all formal elements necessary for interpretation, Fish would contradict his own critique of formalism. If all power were to rest in the hands of the reader, Fish would open himself to the objection that “in the absence of impersonal and universal constraints, interpreters will be free to impose their idiosyncratic meanings on texts” (p.10). At the end of the introduction, Fish claims to have resolved the dichotomies that frustrated his earlier arguments by presenting all parties that have been “competing for the right to constrain interpretation (text, reader, author)” as “products of interpretation.” It should be noted, however, that critical reviews of Fish’s collection have pointed to key flaws in Fish’s logic, judging his analysis to be naïve, incomplete, and significantly less progressive than Fish makes it appear.<ref>Review: . Reviewed Work(s): Is There a Text in This Class? by Stanley Fish. Review author: Catherine Gallagher. ''MLN'', Vol. 96, No. 5, Comparative Literature. (Dec., 1981), pp. 1168-1171. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-7910%28198112%2996%3A5%3C1168%3AITATIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3</ref><ref>Review: . Reviewed Work(s): Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities by Stanley Fish. Review author: Anthony C. Yu. ''Modern Philology'', Vol. 80, No. 1 (Aug., 1982), pp. 113-116. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-8232%28198208%2980%3A1%3C113%3AITATIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B</ref><ref>Review: . Reviewed Work(s): Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities by Stanley Fish. Review author: Edward Proffitt. ''Journal of Aesthetic Education'', Vol. 17, No. 2. (Summer, 1983), pp. 123-125. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8510%28198322%2917%3A2%3C123%3AITATIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H</ref> | |||
In April 2024, ] described him as presidential scholar in residence in invitations to a discussion with ] on free speech, academic freedom, and political expression.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://ncf.iad1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bHEYVNPEBGiVbbE | title=Socratic Stage Dialogue Series Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and Political Expression with Dr. Stanley Fish and Dr. Mark Bauerlein }}</ref> | |||
Two examples to illustrate what Fish defines as the function of interpretive communities are seen here: The first of these involves ] ], who once waited a long time to call a particular pitch. The player asked him, impatiently, "Well, is it a ball or strike?" Klem's reply: "Sonny, it ain't nothing 'til I call it." What Fish is presenting here exemplifies the idea of interpretation: while baseball supplies a rulebook, it is the discretion of the umpire to judge whether or not a pitch falls into the category of ball or strike. Balls and strikes are not undeniable truths. | |||
==Milton== | |||
The second example is found in Fish's essay "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One," which deals with a similar issue of individual interpretation. In this example, Fish considers how interpretation relates to cultural influence."<ref name=isthereatextinthisclass?">Stanley Fish, ''Is There a Text in This Class?'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980). ISBN 0-674-46726-4.</ref> | |||
Fish started his career as a ]. His first book, published by ] in 1965, was on the late-medieval/early-Renaissance poet ]. Fish explains in his partly biographical essay, "], Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour" (published in ''There's No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . And It's a Good Thing, Too''), that he came to Milton by accident. In 1963, the same year that Fish started as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, its resident Miltonist, ], received a grant. The chair of the department asked Fish to teach the Milton course, notwithstanding the fact that the young professor "had never — either as an undergraduate or in graduate school — taken a Milton course" (269). The eventual result was ''Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost'' (1967; rpt. 1997). Fish's 2001 book, ''How Milton Works'', reflects five decades' worth of his scholarship on Milton. About this book, academic and critic ] disagrees with Fish's interpretation that: | |||
<blockquote> Our every likely value is defeated by his poetry. His book needs to presume that we find Milton's beliefs, and even more the sheer force of those beliefs, inimical. It never occurs to Fish that the ] might share any values with Milton… Even when he has a point, Fish is wrestling Milton to his cause. There is no room to consider that Milton's poetry might be wise about human weakness, and that '']'', for instance, might be more notable for its sense of tragedy than for its doctrinal correctness.<ref name="Zapp">{{Cite news |title= Satanic majesties |last=Mullan |first=John |date=4 August 2001 |work=The Guardian |url= https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/aug/04/classics.highereducation |access-date=18 April 2023}}</ref></blockquote> | |||
==Interpretive communities== | |||
In this essay, Mr. Fish tells the reader that in 1971 Mr. Fish he was teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He taught two courses back to back, one beginning at 9:30AM and the next beginning at 11:00AM. The students in the 9:30 class, according to Mr. Fish, were, “interested in the relationship between linguistics and literary criticism.” The second group of students was interested “exclusively” in the “literary and in fact confined to English religious poetry of the seventeenth century.” Mr. Fish forgot to remove the reading assignment for the first group from the blackboard before the second arrived. The blackboard read: | |||
Fish is best known for his analysis of ] — an offshoot of ]. His work in this field examines how the interpretation of a ] is dependent upon each reader's own subjective experience in one or more communities, each of which is defined as a 'community' by a distinct epistemology. For Fish, a large part of what renders a reader's subjective experience valuable — that is, why it may be considered "constrained" as opposed to an uncontrolled and idiosyncratic assertion of the self — comes from a concept native to the field of linguistics called ]. | |||
In Fish's source the term is explained as "the idea that it is possible to characterize a linguistic system that every speaker shares."<ref>Wardaugh, Ronald. ''Reading: a Linguistic Perspective''. University of Michigan: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969. 36, 60.</ref> In the context of literary criticism, he uses this concept to argue that a reader's approach to a text is not completely subjective, and that an internalized understanding of language shared by the native speakers of that given language makes possible the creation of normative boundaries for one's experience with language.{{Citation needed|date=September 2015}} | |||
Jacobs-Rosenbaum | |||
==Fish and university politics== | |||
Levin | |||
Fish has written extensively on the ] of the ], having taken positions supporting campus ]s and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise.<ref>Fish, Stanley. “Professors, Stop Opining About Trump.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 16 July 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/professors-stop-opining-about-trump.html.</ref> | |||
He argued in January 2008 on his ''New York Times''-syndicated blog that the ] are of no ], but have only ]. He explains, "To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said diminishes the object of its supposed praise."<ref>Fish, Stanley. ''The New York Times''. , January 6, 2008.</ref> | |||
Thorne | |||
Fish has lectured across the US at many universities and colleges including ], ], the University of Pennsylvania, ], ], ], the ], the ], the ], ], the ], ], the ], the ], and the ].{{Citation needed|date=September 2015}} | |||
Hayes | |||
==Fish as university politician== | |||
Ohman (?) | |||
As chair of the Duke English department from 1986 to 1992, Fish attracted attention and controversy. Fish, according to ''],'' used "shameless—and in academe unheard-of—entrepreneurial gusto" to take "a respectable but staid Southern English department and transform it into the professional powerhouse of the day", in part through the payment of lavish salaries. His time at Duke saw comparatively quite light undergraduate and graduate coursework requirements for students, matched by their heavy graduate teaching requirements. This permitted professors to reduce their own teaching. In April 1992, near the end of Fish's time as department chair, an external review committee considered evidence that the English curriculum had become "a hodgepodge of uncoordinated offerings", lacking in "broad foundational courses" or faculty planning. The department's dissipating prominence in the 1990s was featured on the front page of '']''.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9902/yaffe.html|title=The Department that Fell to Earth|publisher=Linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org|access-date=August 25, 2013}}</ref> | |||
==Criticisms of his work== | |||
These are the last names of linguists Roderick Jacobs, Peter Rosenbaum, Samuel Levin, J. P. Thorne, Curtis Hayes, and Richard Ohmann – Mr. Fish’s question mark is because he couldn’t remember whether the name Ohmann contained one or two “n”s. | |||
As a frequent contributor to '']''<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061107004252/http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/ |date=November 7, 2006 }}, nytimes.com; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref> and '']'' editorial page, Fish has been the target of wide-ranging criticism. | |||
Mr. Fish had an idea and decided to draw a square around the names and write “p.43” on top. He then told the second group of students that what they saw was a poem they were to interpret. Mr. Fish writes, “The first student to speak pointed out that the poem was probably a hieroglyph, although he was not sure whether it was in the shape of a cross or an altar… Jacobs was explicated as a reference to Jacob's ladder, traditionally allegorized as a figure for the Christian ascent to heaven. In this poem, however, or so my students told me, the means of ascent is not a ladder but a tree, a rose tree or rosenbaum.” All the names, except Hayes, are given equally religious, abstruse, and fictitious meanings. | |||
Based upon the results of his experiment, Mr. Fish concludes, “It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities…interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing.” | |||
Fish, however, does not, as Gustavo Perez-Firmat points, explain why “Hayes” is exempt. Mr. Perez-Firmat writes, “That were unable to construe Hayes tells us something important precisely about their interpretative ability, about its scope and its limitations.” If the students only passed random observations off for truth, then why were they unable to for Hayes? Perez-Firmat wants to know why one name is singled out as different from the others if there are no rules governing interpretation. Mr. Perez-Firmat writes, “the poem is the interpretation, but the interpretation does not accommodate Hayes.” Mr. Perez-Firmat argues that Mr. Fish’s definition of interpretation as non-existent comes apart on this point. | |||
Writing in '']'' magazine, ] reported that not only does Fish openly proclaim himself "unprincipled" but also rejects wholesale the concepts of "fairness, impartiality, reasonableness." To Fish, "ideas have no consequences." For taking this stance, Shulevitz characterizes Fish as "not the unprincipled relativist he's accused of being. He's something worse. He's a fatalist."<ref>''Slate''. , slate.com; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref> | |||
Mr. Fish addresses counterclaims that the second group was predisposed to religious exegesis. He writes, “I must report, however, that I have duplicated this experiment any number of times at nine or ten universities in three countries, and the results are always the same.” Although Mr. Fish doesn’t directly address the omission of Hayes, he implies that this was a one-time occurrence and the larger pattern he observed was fabrication and pretension. | |||
Likewise, among academics, Fish has endured vigorous criticism. The conservative ] writes, {{cquote|Because his general understanding of human nature and of the human condition is false, Fish fails in the specific task of a university scholar, which requires that learning be placed in the service of truth. And this, finally, is the critical issue in the contemporary university of which Stanley Fish is a typical representative: sophistry renders truth itself equivocal and deprives scholarly learning of its reason for being... . His brash disdain of principle and his embrace of sophistry reveal the hollowness hidden at the heart of the current academic enterprise.<ref>R.V. Young , encyclopedia.com; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref>}} | |||
==Fish as university politician== | |||
As chair of the Duke English department from 1986 to 1992, Fish attracted attention and controversy. Fish, according to ''],'' used "shameless–and in academe unheard-of–entrepreneurial gusto" to take "a respectable but staid Southern English department and transform it into the professional powerhouse of the day," in part through the payment of lavish salaries. His time at Duke saw comparatively quite light undergraduate and graduate coursework requirements, matched by heavy graduate teaching requirements. This permitted professors to reduce their own teaching. Within the first years following Fish's departure as chair, many of his most prominent hires left, including ] (citing anti-intellectualism and homophobia), ], and ]. By 1999, Fish's wife, Americanist Jane Tompkins, had "practically quit teaching" at Duke and "worked as a cook at a local health food restaurant." In April 1992, near the end of Fish's time as department chair, an external review committee considered evidence that the English curriculum had become "a hodgepodge of uncoordinated offerings," lacking in "broad foundational courses" or faculty planning. The department's dissipating prominence in the 1990s was featured on the front page of the '']''. | |||
], a prominent British Marxist,<ref>''The Independent.''</ref> excoriates Fish's "discreditable ]" as "sinister". According to Eagleton, "Like almost all diatribes against ], Fish's critique of universalism has its own rigid universals: the priority at all times and places of sectoral interests, the permanence of conflict, the a priori status of belief systems, the rhetorical character of truth, the fact that all apparent openness is secretly closure, and the like." Of Fish's attempt to co-opt the critiques leveled against him, Eagleton responds, "The felicitous upshot is that nobody can ever criticise Fish, since if their criticisms are intelligible to him, they belong to his cultural game and are thus not really criticisms at all; and if they are not intelligible, they belong to some other set of conventions entirely and are therefore irrelevant."<ref>Eagleton, Terry. ''London Review of Books''. ; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref> | |||
==Fish and university politics== | |||
A prominent ] and a hard man to pin down politically, Fish has spent considerable time in various public arenas vigorously debunking pieties of both the ] and the ] — sometimes in the same sentence. | |||
In the essay "Sophistry about Conventions", philosopher ] argues that Fish's theoretical views are based on "extreme relativism and even radical subjectivism." Discounting his work as nothing more than ], Nussbaum claims that Fish "relies on the regulative principle of non-contradiction in order to adjudicate between competing principles", thereby relying on normative standards of argumentation even as he argues against them. Offering an alternative, Nussbaum cites ]'s work in '']'' to highlight "an example of a rational argument; it can be said to yield, in a perfectly recognizable sense, ethical truth." Nussbaum appropriates Rawls's critique of the insufficiencies of Utilitarianism, showing that a rational person will consistently prefer a system of justice that acknowledges boundaries between separate persons rather than relying on the aggregation of the sum total of desires. "This", she claims, "is altogether different from rhetorical manipulation."<ref>Nussbaum, Martha C. ''Love's Knowledge.'' "Sophistry About Conventions", New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. pp. 220-29.</ref> | |||
In addition to his work in literary criticism, Fish has also written extensively on the ] of the ], having taken positions justifying ] and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise. | |||
], author of '']'' and ], denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogeneous and sheltered ivory tower of Duke.<ref>, gos.sbc.edu; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref> | |||
Fish participated in a forum regarding the proper role of universities, which appeared in the ] issue of ''];'' the article, in which Fish appeared alongside notable intellectuals ], ], and ], was entitled: "Affirmative reaction: When Campus Republicans Play the Diversity Card." | |||
David Hirsch, a critic of post-structuralist influences on ], censured Fish for "lapses in logical rigor" and "carelessness toward rhetorical precision." In an examination of Fish's arguments, Hirsch attempts to demonstrate that "not only was a restoration of New Critical methods unnecessary, but that Fish himself had not managed to rid himself of the shackles of New Critical theory." Hirsch compares Fish's work to Penelope's loom in the '']'', stating, "what one critic weaves by day, another unweaves by night." "Nor," he writes, "does this weaving and unweaving constitute a dialectic, since no forward movement takes place." Ultimately, Hirsch sees Fish as left to "wander in his own ] fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."<ref>Hirsch, David H. ''The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz''. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1991. pp. 4, 22–28, 68.</ref> | |||
Fish has lectured across the country at many universities and colleges including ], ], ], the ], the University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky, and ], recently. | |||
== |
==Personal life== | ||
He is married to literary critic ].<ref></ref> | |||
In her essay "Sophistry without Conventions," ] eviscerates Stanley Fish's stance of "extreme relativism and even radical subjectivism." Discounting his work as nothing more than ], Nussbaum demonstrates that Fish "relies on the regulative principle of non-contradiction in order to adjudicate between competing principles," thereby relying on normative standards of argumentation even as he argues against them. Offering an alternative, Nussbaum cites ]'s work in ] to highlight "an example of a rational argument; it can be said to yield, in a perfectly recognizable sense, ethical truth." Nussbaum appropriates Rawls's critique of the insufficiencies of Utilitarianism, showing that a rational person will consistently prefer a system of justice that acknowledges boundaries between separate persons rather than relying on the aggregation of the sum total of desires. "This," she claims, "is all together different from rhetorical manipulation."<ref>Nussbaum, Martha C. ''Love's Knowledge.'' "Sophistry About Conventions." New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. pp. 220-229.</ref> | |||
==Literary references== | |||
], author of the landmark scholarly work ], denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogenous and sheltered ivory tower of Duke.<ref>http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html</ref> | |||
Stanley Fish has been parodied in two novels by ] in which he appears as "Morris Zapp".<ref name="Zapp" /> | |||
==Awards== | |||
David Hirsch, a prominent critic of post-structuralist influences on hermeneutics, censured Fish for "lapses in logical rigor" and "carelessness toward rhetorical precision." With painstaking examination of Fish's arguments, Hirsch demonstrates that "not only was a restoration of New Critical methods unnecessary, but that Fish himself had not managed to rid himself of the shackles of New Critical theory." Hirsch compares Fish's work to Penelope's loom in the ], demonstrating that "what one critic weaves by day, another weaves by night." "Nor," he writes, "does this weaving and unweaving constitute a dialectic, since no forward movement takes place." Ultimately, Hirsche sees Fish as left to "wander in his own ] fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."<ref>Hirsch, DAvid H. The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1991. pp.4, 22-28, 68.</ref> | |||
Fish received the ] in 1994 for ''There's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too.'' | |||
==Notes and references== | |||
<div class="references-small" style="-moz-column-count:2; column-count:2;"> | |||
<references/> | |||
</div> | |||
“Interpretive Assumptions and Interpreted Texts: On a Poem by Stanley Fish,” | |||
Essays in Literature, 11 (1984), 145-52. | |||
==Bibliography== | ==Bibliography== | ||
{{Expand-section|date=January 2007}} | |||
===Primary works by |
===Primary works by Fish=== | ||
*''John Skelton's Poetry''. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1965. | *''John Skelton's Poetry''. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1965. | ||
*''Surprised by Sin: The Reader in'' Paradise Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1967. ISBN |
*''Surprised by Sin: The Reader in'' Paradise Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1967. {{ISBN|0-674-85747-X}} (10). {{ISBN|978-0-674-85747-6}} (13). | ||
* '']: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature''. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1972. | * '']: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature''. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1972. | ||
*"Interpreting the Variorum." '']'' (1976). |
*"Interpreting the Variorum." '']'' (1976). | ||
*"Why We Can't All Just Get Along." '']'' (1996). | *"Why We Can't All Just Get Along." '']'' (1996). | ||
*''The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing''. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1978. | *''The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing''. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1978. | ||
*''Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. ISBN |
*''Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. {{ISBN|0-674-46726-4}} (10). {{ISBN|978-0-674-46726-2}} (13). | ||
*''Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies''. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1989. | *''Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies''. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1989. | ||
*''Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1999. | *''Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1999. | ||
*''The Trouble with Principle''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. |
*''The Trouble with Principle''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. | ||
*''How Milton Works''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. | *''How Milton Works''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. | ||
* Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. | |||
*. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. | |||
*''How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One''. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011. | |||
*Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. | |||
**. Chicago, IL: ], 2014. {{ISBN|978-0-226-06431-4}}. | |||
*''Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom''. New York, NY: ], 2016. {{ISBN|978-0-062-22665-5}}. | |||
*''The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump.'' Atria/One Signal Publishers. 2019 {{ISBN|9781982115241|}}. | |||
===Collections of works by |
===Collections of works by Fish=== | ||
*''There's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too''. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. | *''There's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too''. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. | ||
:The title essay and an additional essay, "Jerry Falwell's Mother," focus on free speech issues. In the latter piece, Fish argues that, if one has some answer in mind to the question "what is free speech good for?" along the lines of "in the free and open clash of viewpoints the truth can more readily be known," then it makes no sense to defend deliberate malicious libel (such as that which was at issue in the ] case of '']'') in the name of "free speech." | :The title essay and an additional essay, "Jerry Falwell's Mother," focus on free speech issues. In the latter piece, Fish argues that, if one has some answer in mind to the question "what is free speech good for?" along the lines of "in the free and open clash of viewpoints the truth can more readily be known," then it makes no sense to defend deliberate malicious libel (such as that which was at issue in the ] case of '']'') in the name of "free speech." | ||
*''The Stanley Fish Reader''. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. | *''The Stanley Fish Reader''. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. | ||
*''Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education'', Princeton, (2015), {{ISBN|9780691167718}} | |||
==See also== | |||
===Secondary criticism about Stanley Fish=== | |||
*] | |||
*Olson, Gary A. ''Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric''. Albany: SUNY P, 2002. | |||
*] | |||
*''Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise''. Ed. Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2004. | |||
*Owen, J. Judd. ''Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism''. Chapters 6-8 and "Appendix: A Reply to Stanley Fish." University of Chicago Press, 2001. | |||
*Perez-Firmat, Gustavo: “Interpretive Assumptions and Interpreted Texts: On a Poem by Stanley Fish,” Essays in Literature, 11 (1984), 145-52. | |||
== |
==Notes and references== | ||
{{Reflist}} | |||
]<br> | |||
] | |||
==Further reading== | |||
*Robertson, Michael. ''Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law''. Cambridge University Press, 2014 | |||
*Olson, Gary A. '''' Carbondale: SIU P, 2016. | |||
*Olson, Gary A. '']''. Albany: SUNY P, 2002. | |||
*''Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise''. Ed. Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2004. | |||
*Owen, J. Judd. ''Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism''. Chapters 6–8 and "Appendix: A Reply to Stanley Fish." University of Chicago Press, 2001. | |||
*Perez-Firmat, Gustavo: “Interpretive Assumptions and Interpreted Texts: On a Poem by Stanley Fish,” Essays in Literature, 11 (1984), 145–52. | |||
*Lang, Chris "The Reader-Response Theory of Stanley Fish" | |||
*Landa, José Ángel García "Stanley E. Fish's Speech Acts" | |||
*Pierre Schlag, "Fish v. Zapp--The Case of the Relatively Autonomous Self," 76 Georgetown Law Journal 37 (1988) | |||
==External links== | ==External links== | ||
{{Wikiquote}} | |||
* published in '''' ], ]. Accessed ], ]. | |||
* published in '''' March 3, 2000. Accessed December 23, 2006. | |||
* Press release. ]. ], ]. | |||
* Press release. ]. June 29, 2005. | |||
* article published in the ''Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism''. | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051101203302/http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/stanley_fish.html |date=November 1, 2005 }} article published in the ''Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism''. | |||
*. ] Law School faculty biography. | |||
*. ] Law School faculty biography. | |||
* at '']'' Editorial section. (TimesSelect subscription required for accessing full texts.) | |||
* at '']'' Editorial section. | |||
*. Radio interview with orogram host, Hugh LaFollette. WETS-FM. ]. n.d. (Audio link.) | |||
* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080906193820/http://www.stpt.usf.edu/hhl/radio/deconstruction.htm |date=September 6, 2008 }}. Radio interview with program host, Hugh LaFollette. WETS-FM. ]. n.d. (Audio link.) | |||
*''''. A self-published non-official website with links to various texts by and about Stanley Fish. Accessed ], ]. | |||
<!-- *''''. A self-published non-official website with links to various texts by and about Stanley Fish. Accessed December 23, 2006. --> | |||
* | |||
*{{C-SPAN|41077}} | |||
;Archival collections | |||
* Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California | |||
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Latest revision as of 15:47, 29 November 2024
American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual (born 1938)This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources: "Stanley Fish" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Stanley Eugene Fish | |
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Born | (1938-04-19) April 19, 1938 (age 86) Providence, Rhode Island |
Occupations |
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Spouse | Jane Tompkins |
Academic background | |
Education | |
Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938) is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Fish is associated with postmodernism, although he views himself instead as an advocate of anti-foundationalism. He is also viewed as having influenced the rise and development of reader-response theory.
During his career he has also taught at the Cardozo School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, The University of Pennsylvania, Yale Law School, Columbia University, The John Marshall Law School, and Duke University.
Early life and education
Fish was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He was raised Jewish. His father, an immigrant from Poland, was a plumber and contractor who made it a priority for his son to get a university education. Fish became the first member of his family to attend college in the US, earning a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959 and an M.A. from Yale University in 1960. He completed his Ph.D. in 1962, also at Yale University.
Academic career
Fish taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before serving as Arts and Sciences Professor of English and professor of law at Duke University from 1986 to 1998. From 1999 to 2004, he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he served as distinguished visiting professor at the John Marshall Law School from 2000 until 2002. Fish also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice and was the chairman of the Religious Studies Committee.
During his tenure there, he recruited professors respected in the academic community, and attracted attention to the college. After resigning as dean in a high-level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC, Fish spent a year teaching in the Department of English. The Institute for the Humanities at UIC named a lecture series in his honor, which is still ongoing. In June 2005, he accepted the position of Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University, teaching in the FIU College of Law.
In November 2010 he joined the board of visitors of Ralston College, a start-up institution in Savannah, Georgia. He has also been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985.
In April 2024, New College of Florida described him as presidential scholar in residence in invitations to a discussion with Mark Bauerlein on free speech, academic freedom, and political expression.
Milton
Fish started his career as a medievalist. His first book, published by Yale University Press in 1965, was on the late-medieval/early-Renaissance poet John Skelton. Fish explains in his partly biographical essay, "Milton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour" (published in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . And It's a Good Thing, Too), that he came to Milton by accident. In 1963, the same year that Fish started as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, its resident Miltonist, Constantinos A. Patrides, received a grant. The chair of the department asked Fish to teach the Milton course, notwithstanding the fact that the young professor "had never — either as an undergraduate or in graduate school — taken a Milton course" (269). The eventual result was Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; rpt. 1997). Fish's 2001 book, How Milton Works, reflects five decades' worth of his scholarship on Milton. About this book, academic and critic John Mullan disagrees with Fish's interpretation that:
Our every likely value is defeated by his poetry. His book needs to presume that we find Milton's beliefs, and even more the sheer force of those beliefs, inimical. It never occurs to Fish that the ever-abused "reader" might share any values with Milton… Even when he has a point, Fish is wrestling Milton to his cause. There is no room to consider that Milton's poetry might be wise about human weakness, and that Paradise Lost, for instance, might be more notable for its sense of tragedy than for its doctrinal correctness.
Interpretive communities
Fish is best known for his analysis of interpretive communities — an offshoot of reader-response criticism. His work in this field examines how the interpretation of a text is dependent upon each reader's own subjective experience in one or more communities, each of which is defined as a 'community' by a distinct epistemology. For Fish, a large part of what renders a reader's subjective experience valuable — that is, why it may be considered "constrained" as opposed to an uncontrolled and idiosyncratic assertion of the self — comes from a concept native to the field of linguistics called linguistic competence.
In Fish's source the term is explained as "the idea that it is possible to characterize a linguistic system that every speaker shares." In the context of literary criticism, he uses this concept to argue that a reader's approach to a text is not completely subjective, and that an internalized understanding of language shared by the native speakers of that given language makes possible the creation of normative boundaries for one's experience with language.
Fish and university politics
Fish has written extensively on the politics of the university, having taken positions supporting campus speech codes and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise.
He argued in January 2008 on his New York Times-syndicated blog that the humanities are of no instrumental value, but have only intrinsic worth. He explains, "To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said diminishes the object of its supposed praise."
Fish has lectured across the US at many universities and colleges including Florida Atlantic University, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, University of Toronto, Columbia University, the University of Vermont, the University of Georgia, the University of Louisville, San Diego State University, the University of Kentucky, Bates College, the University of Central Florida, the University of West Florida, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
Fish as university politician
As chair of the Duke English department from 1986 to 1992, Fish attracted attention and controversy. Fish, according to Lingua Franca, used "shameless—and in academe unheard-of—entrepreneurial gusto" to take "a respectable but staid Southern English department and transform it into the professional powerhouse of the day", in part through the payment of lavish salaries. His time at Duke saw comparatively quite light undergraduate and graduate coursework requirements for students, matched by their heavy graduate teaching requirements. This permitted professors to reduce their own teaching. In April 1992, near the end of Fish's time as department chair, an external review committee considered evidence that the English curriculum had become "a hodgepodge of uncoordinated offerings", lacking in "broad foundational courses" or faculty planning. The department's dissipating prominence in the 1990s was featured on the front page of The New York Times.
Criticisms of his work
As a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fish has been the target of wide-ranging criticism.
Writing in Slate magazine, Judith Shulevitz reported that not only does Fish openly proclaim himself "unprincipled" but also rejects wholesale the concepts of "fairness, impartiality, reasonableness." To Fish, "ideas have no consequences." For taking this stance, Shulevitz characterizes Fish as "not the unprincipled relativist he's accused of being. He's something worse. He's a fatalist."
Likewise, among academics, Fish has endured vigorous criticism. The conservative R. V. Young writes,
Because his general understanding of human nature and of the human condition is false, Fish fails in the specific task of a university scholar, which requires that learning be placed in the service of truth. And this, finally, is the critical issue in the contemporary university of which Stanley Fish is a typical representative: sophistry renders truth itself equivocal and deprives scholarly learning of its reason for being... . His brash disdain of principle and his embrace of sophistry reveal the hollowness hidden at the heart of the current academic enterprise.
Terry Eagleton, a prominent British Marxist, excoriates Fish's "discreditable epistemology" as "sinister". According to Eagleton, "Like almost all diatribes against universalism, Fish's critique of universalism has its own rigid universals: the priority at all times and places of sectoral interests, the permanence of conflict, the a priori status of belief systems, the rhetorical character of truth, the fact that all apparent openness is secretly closure, and the like." Of Fish's attempt to co-opt the critiques leveled against him, Eagleton responds, "The felicitous upshot is that nobody can ever criticise Fish, since if their criticisms are intelligible to him, they belong to his cultural game and are thus not really criticisms at all; and if they are not intelligible, they belong to some other set of conventions entirely and are therefore irrelevant."
In the essay "Sophistry about Conventions", philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that Fish's theoretical views are based on "extreme relativism and even radical subjectivism." Discounting his work as nothing more than sophistry, Nussbaum claims that Fish "relies on the regulative principle of non-contradiction in order to adjudicate between competing principles", thereby relying on normative standards of argumentation even as he argues against them. Offering an alternative, Nussbaum cites John Rawls's work in A Theory of Justice to highlight "an example of a rational argument; it can be said to yield, in a perfectly recognizable sense, ethical truth." Nussbaum appropriates Rawls's critique of the insufficiencies of Utilitarianism, showing that a rational person will consistently prefer a system of justice that acknowledges boundaries between separate persons rather than relying on the aggregation of the sum total of desires. "This", she claims, "is altogether different from rhetorical manipulation."
Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae and public intellectual, denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogeneous and sheltered ivory tower of Duke.
David Hirsch, a critic of post-structuralist influences on hermeneutics, censured Fish for "lapses in logical rigor" and "carelessness toward rhetorical precision." In an examination of Fish's arguments, Hirsch attempts to demonstrate that "not only was a restoration of New Critical methods unnecessary, but that Fish himself had not managed to rid himself of the shackles of New Critical theory." Hirsch compares Fish's work to Penelope's loom in the Odyssey, stating, "what one critic weaves by day, another unweaves by night." "Nor," he writes, "does this weaving and unweaving constitute a dialectic, since no forward movement takes place." Ultimately, Hirsch sees Fish as left to "wander in his own Elysian fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."
Personal life
He is married to literary critic Jane Tompkins.
Literary references
Stanley Fish has been parodied in two novels by David Lodge in which he appears as "Morris Zapp".
Awards
Fish received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 1994 for There's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too.
Bibliography
Primary works by Fish
- John Skelton's Poetry. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1965.
- Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1967. ISBN 0-674-85747-X (10). ISBN 978-0-674-85747-6 (13).
- Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1972.
- "Interpreting the Variorum." Critical Inquiry (1976).
- "Why We Can't All Just Get Along." First Things (1996).
- The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1978.
- Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. ISBN 0-674-46726-4 (10). ISBN 978-0-674-46726-2 (13).
- Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1989.
- Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1999.
- The Trouble with Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.
- How Milton Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001.
- Save The World on Your Own Time Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism, and Law in a Classic TV Show. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
- How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011.
- Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
- *Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-226-06431-4.
- Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2016. ISBN 978-0-062-22665-5.
- The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump. Atria/One Signal Publishers. 2019 ISBN 9781982115241.
Collections of works by Fish
- There's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
- The title essay and an additional essay, "Jerry Falwell's Mother," focus on free speech issues. In the latter piece, Fish argues that, if one has some answer in mind to the question "what is free speech good for?" along the lines of "in the free and open clash of viewpoints the truth can more readily be known," then it makes no sense to defend deliberate malicious libel (such as that which was at issue in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell) in the name of "free speech."
- The Stanley Fish Reader. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
- Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education, Princeton, (2015), ISBN 9780691167718
See also
Notes and references
- "Stanley Fish". Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. 2013. Retrieved November 1, 2015.
- Baldacchino, Joseph. Humanitas. "Two Kinds of Criticism: Reflective Self-Scrutiny vs. Impulsive Self-Validation" Archived May 15, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- "Guide to the Stanley Fish Papers". Online Archive of California. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
- ^ McLane, Maureen (March 21, 1999). "Stanley Fish: Paradox 101". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
- Fish, Stanley (November 2, 2008). "Max the Plumber". Opinionator. The New York Times. Retrieved March 31, 2021.
- ^ "Stanley Fish". FIU Law. Retrieved March 31, 2021.
- The Journal of Blacks In Higher Education No. 30 (Winter, 2000-2001), pp. 44-46. "Stanley Fish Reels in a School of Black Scholars"
- Lynn, Andrea (October 6, 2004). "Experts in the humanities to discuss future of their discipline". News Bureau. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Archived from the original on September 7, 2008. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
- Jaschik, Scott (February 11, 2005). "Life After Stanley". Inside Higher Ed. Archived from the original on May 5, 2006.
- "Privatizing the Public". Invisible Adjunct. October 31, 2003. Archived from the original on December 18, 2003.
- "The Stanley Fish Lecture". University of Illinois at Chicago. April 13, 2007. Archived from the original on April 27, 2007.
- "Collegium Ralstonianum apud Savannenses - Home". Ralston.ac. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
- "List of Active Members by Class" (PDF). American Academy of Arts & Sciences. November 12, 2012. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 5, 2011. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
- "Socratic Stage Dialogue Series Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and Political Expression with Dr. Stanley Fish and Dr. Mark Bauerlein".
- ^ Mullan, John (August 4, 2001). "Satanic majesties". The Guardian. Retrieved April 18, 2023.
- Wardaugh, Ronald. Reading: a Linguistic Perspective. University of Michigan: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969. 36, 60.
- Fish, Stanley. “Professors, Stop Opining About Trump.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 16 July 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/professors-stop-opining-about-trump.html.
- Fish, Stanley. The New York Times. "Will the Humanities Save Us?", January 6, 2008.
- "The Department that Fell to Earth". Linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
- New York Times: Stanley Fish Archived November 7, 2006, at the Wayback Machine, nytimes.com; accessed January 11, 2018.
- Slate. The Indefensible Stanley Fish, slate.com; accessed January 11, 2018.
- R.V. Young Modern Age, encyclopedia.com; accessed January 11, 2018.
- The Independent."Terry Eagleton: Class Warrior."
- Eagleton, Terry. London Review of Books. "The Estate Agent"; accessed January 11, 2018.
- Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge. "Sophistry About Conventions", New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. pp. 220-29.
- Gifts of Speech — Camille Paglia, gos.sbc.edu; accessed January 11, 2018.
- Hirsch, David H. The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1991. pp. 4, 22–28, 68.
- "Former dean at UIC to leave"
Further reading
- Robertson, Michael. Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law. Cambridge University Press, 2014
- Olson, Gary A. Stanley Fish, America's Enfant Terrible: The Authorized Biography. Carbondale: SIU P, 2016.
- Olson, Gary A. Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric. Albany: SUNY P, 2002.
- Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise. Ed. Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2004.
- Owen, J. Judd. Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism. Chapters 6–8 and "Appendix: A Reply to Stanley Fish." University of Chicago Press, 2001.
- Perez-Firmat, Gustavo: “Interpretive Assumptions and Interpreted Texts: On a Poem by Stanley Fish,” Essays in Literature, 11 (1984), 145–52.
- Lang, Chris "The Reader-Response Theory of Stanley Fish"
- Landa, José Ángel García "Stanley E. Fish's Speech Acts"
- Pierre Schlag, "Fish v. Zapp--The Case of the Relatively Autonomous Self," 76 Georgetown Law Journal 37 (1988)
External links
- Interview with Stanley Fish published in The minnesota review March 3, 2000. Accessed December 23, 2006.
- "Leading Professor Stanley Fish to Join FIU Law Faculty." Press release. Florida International University. June 29, 2005.
- Stanley Fish Archived November 1, 2005, at the Wayback Machine article published in the Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism.
- Stanley Fish. Florida International University Law School faculty biography.
- Stanley Fish's blog at The New York Times Editorial section.
- Stanley Fish on Deconstruction Archived September 6, 2008, at the Wayback Machine. Radio interview with program host, Hugh LaFollette. WETS-FM. University of San Francisco. n.d. (Audio link.)
- WorldCat Identities page for Stanley Eugene Fish
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Archival collections
- Guide to the Stanley Fish Papers. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California
- 1938 births
- American academics of English literature
- American people of Polish-Jewish descent
- American literary critics
- American rhetoricians
- Duke University faculty
- Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Florida International University faculty
- Johns Hopkins University faculty
- Literary critics of English
- Living people
- PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award winners
- Writers from Providence, Rhode Island
- University of California, Berkeley faculty
- University of Illinois Chicago faculty
- University of Pennsylvania alumni
- Yale University alumni
- Florida International University College of Law faculty