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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. He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a Professor of Law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Fish has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books. Fish describes himself as an anti-foundationalist.

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, 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 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.

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.

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?’”

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.

Two examples to illustrate what Fish defines as the function of interpretive communities are seen here: The first of these involves baseball umpire Bill Klem, 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.

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."

In 1971 Stanley fish 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 Fish, were, “interested in the relationship between linguistics and literary criticism.” The second group of students were interested “exclusively” in the “literary and were in fact confined to English religious poetry of the seventeenth century.” Fish forgot to remove the reading assignment for the first group from the blackboard before the second arrived. The blackboard read:

“Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Thorne Hayes Ohman (?)”

These are the last names of linguists Roderick Jacobs, Peter Rosenbaum, Samuel Levin, J. P. Thorne, Curtis Hayes, and Richard Ohmann – Fish’s question mark is because he couldn’t remember whether the name Ohmann contained one or two “n”s.

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. 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, 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 goes on to expand his argument into the sociological realm with the claim that when readers go about performing the “art of constructing,” the training that allows them to do such a thing is itself constructed by the experience of growing up in a given interpretive community. Subsequently, as members of that interpretive community, readers are constructed selves as well, shaped by “conventional categories of thought.” The experiment, then, presents an example of one particular interpretive community—college students, namely—successfully using shared interpretive strategies.

Fish, however, does not, as Gustavo Perez-Firmat points out in his essay Interpretive Assumptions and Interpreted Texts: On a Poem by Stanley Fish, explain why “Hayes” is exempt. Perez-Firmat writes, “That they were unable to construe Hayes tells us something important precisely about their interpretative ability, about its scope and its limitations.” He asks why, if there is no objectivity in interpretation, the students are unable to interpret Hayes. Perez-Firmat writes, “the poem is the interpretation, but the interpretation does not accommodate Hayes.”

Fish addresses counterclaims that the second group was predisposed to religious exegesis. He writes, “One might point out that the circumstances of my students' performance were special. After all, they had been concerned exclusively with religious poetry for some weeks, and therefore would be uniquely vulnerable to the deception I had practiced on them and uniquely equipped to impose religious themes and patterns on words innocent of either. 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.”

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 intellectuals 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 Georgia, the University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky, and Bates College, recently.

Criticism

In her essay "Sophistry without Conventions," Martha Nussbaum eviscerates Stanley Fish's stance of "extreme relativism and even radical subjectivism." Discounting his work as nothing more than sophistry, 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 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 the landmark scholarly work 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." 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 Penelope's loom of the Odyssey, 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 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. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980). ISBN 0-674-46726-4.
  6. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge. "Sophistry About Conventions." New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. pp. 220-229.
  7. http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html
  8. Hirsch, DAvid H. The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1991. pp.4, 22-28, 68.

Bibliography

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (January 2007)

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.

See Also

Formalism
New Criticism

External links

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