Page 61 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

David Hirsch, a prominent critic of post-structuralist influences on hermeneutics, censured Fish Notes
for "lapses in logical rigor" and "carelessness toward rhetorical precision." In an examination of
Fish's arguments, Hirsch attempts to demonstrate 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's work to Penelope's loom in the Odyssey, stating, "what
one critic weaves by day, another unweaves by night." "Nor," he writes, "does this weaving and
unweaving constitute a dialectic, since no forward movement takes place." Ultimately, Hirsch sees
Fish as left to "wander in his own Elysian fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and
from humanity."
Intent of Author
It is in this same manner that Fish dismisses the idea of authorial intent as the guiding principle
in interpretation. In analyzing one of his previous critical works he declares, I did what critics
always do: I "saw" what my interpretive principles permitted or directed me to see, and then I
turned around and attributed what I had 'seen' to a text and an intention. . . . What I am suggesting
is that formal units are always a function of the interpretive model one brings to bear; they are not
"in" the text, and I would make the same argument for intentions. To claim that the author
intended to say or do such and such is really a declaration regarding the interpreter, in Fish's
theory. Thus different interpreters will see different intentions because they are a creation of the
reader and not the author. As with New Critical theory, the author fails to live past the creation of
the text, indeed, for Fish the author as well is a creation of the reader.
Fish can make this move because of his epistemic beliefs that nothing we see, perceive, or think is
uninterpreted. He considers the attempt to access the author's intention as naive; for how would
one ever access an intention as it does not exist in any objective or uninterpreted realm that can be
mediated to our consciousness without itself being interpreted? We could have access to documents
regarding the author's true intention, "but the documents . . . that would give us that intention are
no more available to a literal reading (are no more uninterpreted) than the literal reading it would
yield." Thus when John writes, "These things have been written that you might believe that Jesus
is the Christ, the son of God; and that believing you may have eternal life in his name," we are no
closer to his intentions than were he to have said and written nothing.
Fish is following after the New Critical school, which as we have seen, disregarded authorial
intent as well as historical interpretation. For Fish it is not important to access the original context
in order to access meaning. He says, "to consult dictionaries, grammars, and histories is to assume
that meanings can be specified independently of the activity of reading." But as we have seen it is
the activity of reading which takes center stage in the making of meaning. Fish posits this because
he believes that we as interpreters are cut off from past worlds or cultures. In other words, he
believes that we are without commonality with past cultures and that, therefore, a complete
disjuncture exists. The interpreter belongs to a different world from the author.
Interpretive Communities
What lies behind Fish's thinking at this point is a strong view of the social construction of reality.
Fish firmly believes that knowledge is not objective but always socially conditioned. All that one
thinks and "knows" is an interpretation that is only made possible by the social context in which
one lives. For Fish the very thoughts one thinks are made possible by presuppositions of the
community in which one lives and furthermore the socially conditioned individual, which all
individuals are, cannot think beyond the limits made possible by the culture. This culture is
referred to by Fish as an "interpretive community" and the strategies of an interpreter are community
property, and insofar as they at once enable and limit the operations of his consciousness.
Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading
but for writing texts, for constituting their properties.
Fish believes that interpretive communities, like languages, are purely conventional, that is,
arbitrarily agreed upon constructions. The way a community lives is in no way a reflection of

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