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Stanley Fish (born 1938) is a prominent literary theorist. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fish 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. After stepping down as Dean, Fish spent a year teaching in the Department of English. In the Spring of 2005, his final semester at UIC, Professor Fish taught a course in literary criticism and theory entitled, "Religion, Citizenship & Identity." 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.

Considered a leading scholar of Milton, Fish's distinguished reputation began with his critical analysis of the seventeenth century poet's work. Two of Fish's books, Surprised By Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost 1967, and How Milton Works, 2001, reflect over five decades of his scholarship analyzing Milton.

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 are defined as a 'community' by a distinct epistemology. Fish works to reconcile two arguments: first, that the only possible interpretation of a work is in the context of a particular interpretive community's inderstanding of said work; the second argument -- which is Fish's claim -- that the only true meaning of a text is the meaning that the author intended; his solution separates the two modes of thought, but allows room for both; he distinguishes the first as a sociological claim, and the second as authorial intent. While the only true meaning is what the author intended, what each given reader will see varies based on his or her own interpretive community -- and even membership in said 'community' will not guarantee a uniform understanding.

An illustration of these interpretive communities -- as Fish likes to relate to as a model -- is that of 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 saying is, balls and strikes are not undeniable truths; rather, they "come into being only on the call of an umpire."

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.

Fish has said that deconstruction: "relieves me of the obligation to be right . . . and demands only that I be interesting." Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute calls that "a silly thing for a grown man to say and a criminal thing for a teacher to say."

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 was recently a participant in a forum, 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, is entitled: "Affirmative reaction: When Campus Republicans Play the Diversity Card."

Works (books only)

By Stanley Fish

• Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Harvard University Press; 1967).

• Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Harvard University Press; 1980).

• Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Duke University Press; 1989).

• There's No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It is a Good Thing, Too (Oxford University Press; 1994).

• Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Harvard University Press; 1999).

• The Trouble with Principle (1999).

• How Milton Works (Harvard University Press; 2001).

Criticism and/or Analysis of Stanley Fish’s work

• The Stanley Fish Reader, edited by H. Aram Veeser (Blackwell Publishers Ltd; 1999).

• Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric, by Gary A. Olson (State University Press of New York; 2002).

• Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise, edited by Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham (State University of New York Press; 2004).

External links

• Stanley Fish in the Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism.
• Stanley Fish interview at the minnesota review
• Leading Professor Stanley Fish to Join FIU Law Faculty

• 1938 births
• American writers