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Revision as of 04:53, 25 September 2003 by 207.179.108.132 (talk) (links, PBS, Fish's book)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Stanley Fish (b. 1938) is a professor of English literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Considered a leading scholar of Milton, he is best known for his work on interpretive communities, an offshoot of reader-response criticism that studies how the interpretation of a text by a reader depends on the reader's membership in one or more communities defined by acceptance of a common set of foundational assumptions or texts. This work can be viewed as an explanation of how meaning is possible in the context of a particular interpretive community, even if one accepts the deconstructionist position that there is no single privileged reading of any text.
He has said that deconstruction
- "relieves me of the obligation to be right . . . and demands only that I be interesting."
Charles Murray of the Hoover Institution calls that "a silly thing for a grown man to say and a criminal thing for a teacher to say." Given Stanley Fish's complicated relationship with deconstructionism, it is not clear whether his statement is intended as an argument for or against the practice.
Stanley Fish has 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.
Stanley Fish appeared in a PBS documentary film on the ACLU saying something similar to "These people think that ideas should just be able to just bounce into each other and somehow we will figure out what's right. I know of no way to tell sense from nonsense".
Stanley Fish is the author of There's No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too (1994 ISBN 0195093836)
External links
Entry for Stanley Fish in the Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. page at the at the University of Illinois at Chicago.