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Stanley Fish (born 1938) is a prominent American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He is among the most important critics of the English poet John Milton in the 20th century, and is often associated with post-modernism, at times to his irritation as he describes himself as an anti-foundationalist. He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a Professor of Law at Florida International University, in Miami, as well as Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of 10 books. Professor Fish has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University.

Academic career

Fish did his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1962. He taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before becoming 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. 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 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.

On Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies

“Drawing from fields as diverse as literary studies, the law, psychoanalysis, baseball, and popular music, Fish presents one compelling example after another of the ‘unreflexive actions that follow from being embedded in a context of practice,’ and has, in this collection of essays, made another major contribution to the study of interpretation.” --Frank Donoghue, MLN

“No one can doubt the brilliance of Fish’s writing.” --The Guardian (London)

Book Description “With six enormously influential and widely discussed books to his credit, Stanley Fish is perhaps the most quoted, most controversial, most in-demand, and most feared English teacher in the world, and one of the very best essayists in any field. . . . Beginning as, and remaining, a specialist in the literature of the English Renaissance up to Milton, Fish has transformed himself into a highly influential, widely discussed professor of law as well. And as his latest collection of essays, Doing What Comes Naturally, demonstrates, his interests are global, and include not only literature and law, but linguistics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, professionalism, and theoretically, any intellectual discourse whatsoever. . . . masterful book.”—Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Times Literary Supplement

“Of literary critics whose work comes to mind under the heading ‘theory,’ Stanley Fish . . . has been preeminent as the orchestrator of a number of approaches to interpretation, chief among them reader-response criticism and deconstruction. . . . While no less rigorous than his earlier studies of Renaissance literature, Doing What Comes Naturally is a handy textbook for those who wish to catch up on the variety of questions to which literary criticism can usefully address itself today and to see a deconstructive method in action in various intellectual contexts, particularly in examining questions of literature and law.”—Peter Meisel, New York Times Book Review

On Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities

Times Literary Supplement : It is a great...pleasure these days to find a critic willing to discuss language, literature, reading, writing, and the community of readers on the understanding that the reader plays a real part in the production of his experience. --Denis Donoghue

Criticism : No bare summary of his conclusions can do justice to the brilliance of his analyses...Is There a Text in This Class? is a substantial achievement which deserves the serious consideration of all students of literature. Its arguments are cogent, forceful and engaging, its style witty, personable and unpretentious, and its analyses are just, incisive and economical. Most important, the theory it advocates is provocative, comprehensive and, I believe, true.

These essays demonstrate why Fish has become the center--as both source and focus--of so much intellectual energy in contemporary American critical theory. For brilliance and forcefulness in argumentation and for sheer boldness of mind and spirit, he has no match. --Barbara Herrnstein Smith

On There's No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too

From Publishers Weekly Head of Duke University's English Department and putative flag-bearer for political correctness, Fish here collects a lively and vigorous sampling of his cultural criticism. Notable are his textured essays written for a series of campus debates with conservative Dinesh D'Souza. Fish places such current education controversies as those over multiculturist requirements in historical perspective; scores simplistic critics of affirmative action; suggests self-segregation can be justified as an exercise of autonomy; and observes that political power and " real political correctness" is determined by the "triple threat of money, media domination and governmental regulation." His provocative title essay argues cogently that the neat legal definition between speech and conduct breaks down in concrete examples. In more abstruse essays, Fish turns his analytic skills, honed in literarycriticism, to dissect some of the presumptions of legal thought. If the essays do range a bit, they are linked by a skeptical and probing voice.

From Library Journal Fish, the author of numerous books on Milton, literary theory, and the politics of teaching, has become in recent years famous for defending the contemporary academy in a series of debates held at various colleges and universities with the neo-conservative pundit Dinesh D'Souza. In anticipation of these debates, he prepared five remarkable essays, which constitute the core of this learned and wide-ranging collection. Other essays concern the political and historical context of controversies over the notion of "free speech," as well as the enduring legacy of Milton and the masochism of Volvo-driving academics. Despite his public reputation, Fish's views cannot be easily subsumed under such labels as "deconstructionist," "post-structuralist," or even "leftist." The provocative title simply refers to the fact that, as Fish avers, "the act of speaking would make no sense... absent some already-in-place and (for the time being) unquestioned ideological vision." Many readers will find pleasure in Fish's simultaneously literate but blunt prose style. Recommended for informed readers. - Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York

On Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost

Review Thirty years after its original publication. Surprised by Sin remains the one indispensable book on Milton. This dazzling, high-stakes work of mind taught a generation of readers how to read anew. And, lest we thought its rigorous injunctions had been dulled or blandly assimilated by the intervening years, Fish dares us, in a formidable new preface, to think again. --Linda Gregerson, University of Michigan

Thirty years ago, Surprised by Sin initiated the modern age in Milton criticism. Still the one book necessarily engaged by Milton scholars, it continues to provoke, irritate, and illuminate. Reissued now, with a substantial new preface, it clarifies in fascinating ways not only the course of Milton studies but also the continuing career of its controversial author. --Marshall Grossman, University of Maryland at College Park

The first edition of Surprised by Sin revised the critical landscape of Milton studies more significantly and more influentially than any other analysis of Paradise Lost in modern history. The second edition contains a substantial preface, not only an apologia but also a brilliant critical manifesto in its own right. Fish thereby affirms the validity, preeminence, and timeliness of his "great argument," which will continue to inform critical debates unremittingly in the future. --Albert C. Labriola, Duquesne University

Book Description In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps: one proclaiming (in the tradition of Blake and Shelley) that Milton was of the devil's party with or without knowing it, the other proclaiming (in the tradition of Addison and C. S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him. The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying. Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

On The Trouble with Principle

From Publishers Weekly American democracy rests its freedoms and legal procedures on principles that are impersonal and universal (e.g., freedom, equality). A good idea? No, says Fish. He argues vigorously that universal principles actually impede democracy. Counterintuitive as his claim may appear, Fish makes a strong and lucid case. The trouble with principle, he explains, is this: it disregards history, tradition and contexts of every sort that shape understanding. According to FishAa controversial literary scholar and theorist who has applied his theories of interpretation to the study of lawAwe can never find a neutral position that will fully transcend our prejudices, commitments and beliefs. And worse yet, high-minded abstractions can be used to mask undemocratic privilege. He offers the current controversy over affirmative action and reverse discrimination as a case in point. Those who agitate for an end to affirmative action usually do so on the principled grounds that it ignores "merit." But what is merit? It describes, says Fish, "whatever qualifications are deemed desirable for the performance of a particular task, and there is nothing fixed about those qualifications." Fish supports affirmative action because he believes we must take into account the history of oppression suffered by the groups that affirmative action is meant to benefit. Yet Fish is no liberal. In fact, he devotes most of his book to the problems entailed in the liberal understanding of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Liberals, he says, duck behind the comforting fictionAor "principle"Athat we are all the same underneath. FishAhard-nosed, unflinching and persuasiveAmaintains that differences are real and must be faced squarely without recourse to timeless, abstract principles. His cautiously reasoned argument, not easily dismissed, will excite controversy. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The New York Times Book Review, Katha Pollitt ...it's witty, erudite and brimming with self-delight. It's also intermittently frivolous, blinkered and unfair. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews By turns ludicrous and shrewd, a polemic against ``neutral principles like free speech, freedom of religion, and nondiscrimination. Continuing his pilgrimage away from his origins as a literary critic, Fish (Dean/College of Liberal Arts and Sciences/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too, 1993, etc.) plays political philosopher here, applying his own brew of postmodern pragmatism to analyses of current public issues. He wants to expose as a sham what he calls ``neutral principleabstractions like fairness, impartiality, mutual respect. These, he says, are inherently empty of meaning, which they acquire only when invoked in the service of a ``partisan agenda, at which point they are no longer neutral. Fish doesn't mind using these principles when they serve the agenda he favorsleft-centrist concerns like enhanced opportunities for minorities and womenbut is annoyed when they are used to support causes he opposes, such as the repeal of affirmative- action laws. Largely to discredit the ``hijacking of these principles by right-wingers and other foes, he deconstructs neutral principles in many forms: First Amendment law, multiculturalism, religious tolerance, foundationalist philosophies. Many chapters have previously been published as separate articles, and their presentation here is sometimes repetitive. Fish is, nonetheless, an entertaining writer, adept at close reading and handy with a barb (the ACLU, ``that curious organization whose mission it is to find things it hates and then to grow them). Still, his neo-Machiavellianism will repel anyone who does believe in principle, and his arguments are rife with muddy concepts and self-contradiction. How, exactly, do you tell the difference between ``neutral principle (bad) and ``moral principle (good)? And how can Fish deny the existence of a neutral point of view while insisting he does so from a neutral point of view? Fish likes to think of himself as appealingly ``provocative and ``perverse, but the appeal may escape some readers, leaving him merely perverse. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Raymond Tallis, Times Literary Supplement " beautifully written and genuinely provocative book." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review New York Times : attacks are so smartly provocative that they are worth reading. --Edward Rothstein

Times Literary Supplement : beautifully written and genuinely provocative book. --Raymond Tallis

Philadelphia Inquirer : The Trouble with Principle continues the assault on liberal shibboleths that Fish first launched with There's No Such Thing as Free Speech...and It's a Good Thing Too...He is a penetrating thinker and, rarity of rarities, a clear and accessible writer...He will challenge, if not change, the way liberals think about, say, multiculturalism. --Sanford Pinsker

New Leader : In The Trouble with Principle, his latest collection of papers, Fish deploys a master argument that goes like this: The trouble with principle is that they are either so abstract and contentless that all the work is done filling in the details, or else sufficiently concrete as to be very controversial indeed. --Richard Rorty

Commentary : Fish's main target in The Trouble with Principle is the influential school of liberal thought developed by such well-known theorists as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amy Gutmann, and Jurgen Habermas. What unites these writers--and their many followers, especially in legal circles--is a deep commitment to the principle of 'neutrality,' that is, to the idea that the essence of liberalism is to be open to all points of view and ways of life...As Fish convincingly shows, however, this pose of neutrality is little more than a sham, a rhetoric of tolerance that often serves as a cover for intolerance...There is much to recommend in The Trouble with Principle, not least the wit and elegance with which Stanley Fish punctures the pretensions of modern liberalism. --Adam Wolfson

New Jersey Law Review : That his arguments so crisply challenge traditional ways of thinking about jurisprudence is what makes The Trouble with Principle so provocative and engaging. Lawyers or anyone else interested in examining and questioning the foundations of judicial thought should consider this book required reading. --Randall J. Peach

Christian Century : I consider this book a splendid rarity: a work by a non-Christian with the (unintended?) virtue of making those Christians more devout. It's also a good read: Fish is master of a lucid and witty prose of a kind rarely written by academics these days. --Paul J. Griffiths

Atlanta Journal Constitution : Sports, film, TV and radio, politics and journalism--Fish is fluent wherever he goes... His rhetorical style is surgically precise, and in The Trouble with Principle it is his best friends who are put under the knife--liberals comfortable with beliefs whose rightness they take for granted...In the art of argument, he is formidably skilled...He will unravel your every position, reducing it to words of reversible meanings...The Trouble with Principle is a shrewd, unsparing critique of liberalism by a man most people assume to be one of them. --Michael Skube

Booklist : No stranger to controversy, Fish smashes an idol sacred to conservatives and liberals alike: the principle of government neutrality in cultural disputes. Taking on conservatives, Fish challenges the racial neutrality championed by opponents to affirmative action, arguing that such neutrality serves only to obscure historical inequalities crying out for redress. But he pours out his most scalding criticisms on the liberal theorists--from Locke to Rawls--who have formulated the neutralist rhetoric and its underlying logic...True liberals will rally to defend the principled neutrality Fish assails, but many readers will welcome his call for an end to doctrinal paralysis. Sure to become a touchstone in debates on political theory. --Bryce Christensen

Publishers Weekly : argues vigorously that universal principles actually impede democracy. Counterintuitive as his claim may appear, Fish makes a strong and lucid case. The trouble with principle, he explains, is this: it disregards history, tradition and contexts of every sort that shape understanding. According to Fish, we can never find a neutral position that will fully transcend our prejudices, commitments and beliefs...Fish--hard-nosed, unflinching and persuasive--maintains that differences are real and must be faced squarely without recourse to timeless, abstract principles. His cautionary reasoned arguments, not easily dismissed, will excite controversy.

Kirkus Reviews : wants to expose as a sham what he calls 'neutral principle'--'abstractions like fairness, impartiality, mutual respect.' These, he says, are inherently empty of meaning, which they acquire only when invoked in the service of a 'partisan agenda'...Fish is...an entertaining writer, adept at close reading and handy with a barb.

Literary Review of Canada : Fish...has made a career out of corralling sacred cows and showing that they are only bovine, not divine...In this intellectual tour de force, Fish's big target is liberalism in its modern Rawlsian mode: the belief that it is possible and desirable to organize social life in such a way as to retain neutrality among competing visions of the good. But he works at it from the bottom up by taking on practical but key issues such as free speech, multiculturalism and church-state relations. --Allan Hutchinson

World Literature Today : Both Stanley Fish and this particular collection of his essays have been described as 'contrarian.' It is a label that Fish himself obviously revels in...The very title of his book, The Trouble with Principle, suggests the deliberately perverse approach and methodology of his essays. The result is a sheer reading delight and an excellent contribution to an understanding of argument. --Robert D. Spector

Book Description

Stanley Fish is an equal opportunity antagonist. A theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right, Fish here turns with customary gusto to the trouble with principle. Specifically, Fish has a quarrel with neutral principles. The trouble? They operate by sacrificing everything people care about to their own purity. And they are deployed with equal highmindedness and equally absurd results by liberals and conservatives alike.

In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those who invoke one are always making a rhetorical and political gesture. In the end, it is history and context, the very substance against which a purportedly abstract principle defines itself, that determines a principle's content and power. In the course of making this argument, Fish takes up questions about academic freedom and hate speech, affirmative action and multiculturalism, the boundaries between church and state, and much more. Sparing no one, he shows how our notions of intellectual and religious liberty--cherished by those at both ends of the political spectrum--are artifacts of the very partisan politics they supposedly transcend. The Trouble with Principle offers a provocative challenge to the debates of our day that no intellectually honest citizen can afford to ignore

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 John Skelton. 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.

Interpretive communities

As a literary theorist, Fish is best known for his analysis of interpretive communities — an offshoot of reader-response criticism. Fish's 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, 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.

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 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, 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 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (citing anti-intellectualism and homophobia), Michael Moon, and Jonathan Goldberg. 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 New York Times.

Fish and university politics

A prominent public intellectual and a hard man to pin down politically, Fish has spent considerable time in various public arenas vigorously debunking pieties of both the left and the right — sometimes in the same sentence.

In addition to his work in literary criticism, Fish has also written extensively on the politics of the university, having taken positions justifying campus speech codes and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise.

Fish participated in a forum regarding the proper role of universities, which appeared in the September 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine; the article, in which Fish appeared alongside notable academics David Gelernter, Lani Guinier, and Elizabeth Hoffman, was entitled "Affirmative Reaction: When Campus Republicans Play the Diversity Card."

Fish has lectured across the country at many universities and colleges including Brown University, Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Vermont, the University of Georgia, the University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky, and Bates College, recently.

Criticism

In her essay "Sophistry about Conventions," Martha Nussbaum argues that Stanley 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 all together different from rhetorical manipulation."

Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae, 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.

David Hirsch, a prominent 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, Hirsche sees Fish as left to "wander in his own Elysian fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."

Notes and references

1. Wardaugh, Ronald. Reading: a Linguistic Perspective. University of Michigan: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969. 36, 60.
2. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge. "Sophistry About Conventions." New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. pp. 220-229.
3. http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html
4. Hirsch, David H. The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1991. pp.4, 22-28, 68.

“Interpretive Assumptions and Interpreted Texts: On a Poem by Stanley Fish,” Essays in Literature, 11 (1984), 145-52.

Bibliography

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Primary works by Stanley 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 0-674-467264 (10). ISBN 978-067-4467262 (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.

Collections of works by Stanley 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.

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.

See also

• Formalism
• New Criticism

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 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. Radio interview with orogram host, Hugh LaFollette. WETS-FM. University of San Francisco. n.d. (Audio link.)
• Stanley Fish Resources Center. A self-published non-official website with links to various texts by and about Stanley Fish. Accessed December 23, 2006.

• 1938 births
• American literary critics
• Living people
• Rhetoricians
• Duke University faculty
• University of Illinois at Chicago faculty