Page 60 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too (1994), Fish argues that free speech cannot be separated from
partisan politics and therefore scorns liberals who believe in the possibility of neutrality. Fish's
interest in politics continued with Professional Correctness (1995), in which he criticizes academics
for investing their scholarly writings with political meaning, and The Trouble with Principle
(1999), in which he uses, among other examples, the debate over affirmative action to assert that
an emphasis on principles impedes democracy.

5.4 Criticisms of Stanley’s Work

As a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fish
has been the target of wide-ranging criticism.
To Fish, "ideas have no consequences." For taking this stance, Shulevitz characterizes Fish as "not
the unprincipled relativist he's accused of being. He's something worse. He's a fatalist."
Likewise, among academics, Fish has endured vigorous criticism. The conservative R. V. Young
writes, Because his general understanding of human nature and of the human condition is false,
Fish fails in the specific task of a university scholar, which requires that learning be placed in the
service of truth. And this, finally, is the critical issue in the contemporary university of which
Stanley Fish is a typical representative: sophistry renders truth itself equivocal and deprives
scholarly learning of its reason for being. . . . His brash disdain of principle and his embrace of
sophistry reveal the hollowness hidden at the heart of the current academic enterprise.
Terry Eagleton, a prominent British Marxist, excoriates Fish's "discreditable epistemology" as
"sinister." According to Eagleton, "Like almost all diatribes against universalism, Fish's critique of
universalism has its own rigid universals: the priority at all times and places of sectoral interests,
the permanence of conflict, the a priori status of belief systems, the rhetorical character of truth,
the fact that all apparent openness is secretly closure, and the like." Hence, it is inherently self-
defeating. Of Fish's attempt to co-opt the critiques leveled against him, Eagleton responds, "The
felicitous upshot is that nobody can ever criticise Fish, since if their criticisms are intelligible to
him, they belong to his cultural game and are thus not really criticisms at all; and if they are not
intelligible, they belong to some other set of conventions entirely and are therefore irrelevant."

Writing in Slate Magazine, Judith Shulevitz reported that not only does Fish openly
proclaim himself "unprincipled" but also rejects wholesale the concepts of "fairness,
impartiality, reasonableness."

In her essay "Sophistry about Conventions," philosopher 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 and public intellectual, denounced Fish as a "totalitarian
Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective
of a tenured professor at the homogeneous and sheltered ivory tower of Duke.

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