Page 62 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes some higher reality, it is rather a construction, or edifice that has been erected by consensus. This
holds true for the interpretive strategies a culture or an institution employs as well as their notions
of right and wrong. A culture's morality is no more founded in any external reality than its
language. Nor is it possible to specify how language correlates with the external world. Language
and its usage are arbitrary decisions made by convention as is the fact that we call north "North"
instead of something else.
In response to a criticism launched by M. H. Abrams, Fish explains some of his understanding of
the conventional nature of language. If what follows is communication or understanding, it will
not be because he and I share a language, in the sense of knowing the meanings of individual
words and the rules for combining them, but because a way of thinking, a form of life, shares us,
and implicates us in a world of already-in-place objects, purposes, goals, procedures, values, and
so on; and it is to the features of that world that any words we utter will be heard as necessarily
referring.
Similarly, what we call literature is not such because of some abiding principle of truth or art that
exists in an atemporal state, but it is such because the culture values it for interests of its own, that
is because it reflects the culture's values and beliefs in some way.
Thus the act of recognizing literature is not constrained by something in the text, nor does it issue
from an independent and arbitrary will; rather, it proceeds from a collective decision as to what
will count as literature, a decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or
believers continues to abide by it.
In this view literature is simply the expression of an ideology. Because of his views on literature,
literature tends to lose its "special status" as literature and becomes simply a reflection of communal
values which is as subject to change as are cultures. That is not to say that the individual or culture
consciously chooses its values, which would imply some form of objectivity or the ability to stand
apart from one's values. To Fish it is not possible to abstract one's self from one's values. Fish is
simply a product of his environment without the ability to choose his beliefs and values. They are
instead informed or determined by the culture which is historically conditioned and no more able
to choose objectively than the individual.
Using Fish as an example of post-structuralist critical theory, I will in the remaining chapters
analyze his thought as it relates to post-modernism. What follows is an examination of post-
modernism from the perspective of the discipline of philosophy, or an history of ideas approach.
It is not intended to be a comprehensive history of Western philosophy but a brief examination of
some of the salient features which I believe have contributed to the rise of what is now being
called post-modernism. I will end the chapter with an emphasis on the "linguistic turn", as Rorty
has called it, in philosophy of the twentieth century by examining some of the philosophy of
Ludwig Wittgenstein as his thinking bears some similarities to that of Stanley Fish and lays some
of the groundwork for the current state of things. Wittgenstein is important as his thinking is often
characterized as thoroughly conventionalist and misappropriated as such.
In this Unit would also like to take a critical look at some of Fish's theory and examine some of the
consequences of his thinking. Fish claims that because his thinking is theoretical it is without
consequences (he consistently tells his critics "not to worry"). He is at least disingenuous if not
patently dishonest in this assertion as his theories have grave consequence especially for those
who would appeal to some transcendent standard.
In taking a critical stance toward Fish's literary theory I am well aware of Fish's response to those
who disagree with his theories or, as he puts it, "feel threatened" by his ideas. Those who hold to
the idea of essences, or to the reality and accessibility of transcendent truths, he labels as
foundationalists, members of the "intellectual right. And he further accuses them of holding to a
naive epistemology which views the mind as merely reflecting the world as it really is. Moreover

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