Page 59 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 5: Is There a Text in This Class—Introduction to Stanley Fish

5.2 Biographical Information Notes

Fish was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on April 19, 1938. His family moved to Philadelphia,
where he attended the University of Pennsylvania and received his B.A. in 1959. Upon graduating
from college, he married Adrienne A. Aaron, with whom he had a daughter; Fish and Aaron
divorced in 1980. He attended graduate school at Yale, earning his Ph.D., with a thesis on the
English poet John Skelton, in 1962. While at Berkeley Fish released his first book, John Skelton's
Poetry (1965), as well as subsequent volumes that established his critical reputation. In 1974 Fish
moved to Johns Hopkins University, where he was named Kenan Professor of English. During
this period, he married his second wife, Jane Parry Tompkins, also a professor, in 1982. Fish began
working at Duke University in 1985, where he served as Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor
of English and Law, chair of the English department, associate vice provost, and executive director
of Duke University Press. Since 1999 he has held the position of dean of the College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Fish's first teaching job was at the University of California at Berkeley, where he
received incremental promotions from the position of instructor, beginning in
1962, to that of professor of English in 1969.

5.3 Major Works

Beginning his career with strictly academic subjects, Fish's writings came to include concerns
outside of the classroom. His first book, John Skelton's Poetry, which grew out of his doctoral
thesis, takes a radical perspective in interpreting Skelton's work. Fish contends that Skelton was
basically a private poet and that his implicitly Christian verse serves as a record of the poet's
religious development; at the center of Fish's argument is the "psychological (spiritual) history" of
what he refers to as the "protagonist." In his next book, Surprised by Sin (1967), Fish daringly
argues that the subject of John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost, is actually the reader. Fish
attempts to show that the text of the poem, controlled by its author's didactic goals, uses different
techniques involving form and theme to call attention to the reader's interpretive inadequacies;
the reader's deficiencies are pointed out by the poem, making the reader open to being educated
as to "the ways of God to men." Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972) presents a more direct confrontation
of the matter of form within a text. In this book Fish identifies two types of literature: rhetorical,
which confirms and reinforces the author's position, therefore affirming the reader's expectations
and "self-esteem"; and dialectical, which undermines, or "consumes," the reader's self-esteem by
challenging assumptions and subverting expectations.
Fish contends that seventeenth-century writers such as John Donne, George Herbert, John Bunyan,
and Milton construct texts that are consumed under their own authority-thereby winning Fish's
favor. In Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Fish continues to explore the idea of reader-as-
subject. This collection of essays provides a broader statement of the author's notion that the
reader, instead of merely discovering the meaning of a text, actually determines it. The author also
calls into question the credibility of facts, maintaining that what are considered facts actually rely
on certain assumptions within particular institutions. Facts thus depend upon the agreement of
the members of an institution; if the nature of the institution is questioned, then the facts embraced
by that institution can also be called into doubt. Is There a Text in This Class? emphasizes the role
of an "interpretive community," whereby meaning is attributed to a text through readers who, as
members of such a group, share certain "interpretive assumptions." Doing What Comes Naturally
(1989) broadens the scope of the author's work in literary criticism to include legal studies. In this
collection of essays, Fish examines the relation of theory to practice, the connection between
meaning and context, and the influence of rhetoric on argument. In There's No Such Thing as Free

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