Page 63 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

they are characterized as without understanding how fundamental language is to one's world Notes
view and the cultural assumptions that go with it. I must plead guilty to being a foundationalist
with objections to Fish's theory. Fish claims that his theory, however, is internally coherent, while
I will argue just the opposite, that his theory does not cohere based on his own assumptions. Fish's
response to these criticisms would be to deny me as his critic access to his theory in the first place
because I do not share his assumptions and, to him, only those who are within a community can
understand its thought. That claim is, however, as we shall see, one of the bases of my criticism.
Let us turn briefly to the history of philosophy.
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Fish was born in ............... .
(a) 1938 (b) 1935
(c) 1940 (d) 1945
(ii) ‘Is there a text in this Class’ was published in ............... .
(a) 1988 (b) 1975
(c) 1980 (d) 1982
(iii) ‘Sexual Personae’ was written by ............... .
(a) Camille Raglia (b) Stanley
(c) Martha Nussbaum (d) None of these
(iv) Fish began working at Duke University in ............... .
(a) 1985 (b) 1980
(c) 1981 (d) 1975
5.5 Summary

• Stanley Fish is one of America's most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes
a profound reexamination of some of criticism's most basic assumptions. He penetrates to
the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading
formulations, and offers a stunning proposal for a new way of thinking about the way we
read.
• Fish begins by examining the relation between a reader and a text, arguing against the
formalist belief that the text alone is the basic, knowable, neutral, and unchanging component
of literary experience. But in arguing for the right of the reader to interpret and in effect
create the literary work, he skillfully avoids the old trap of subjectivity. To claim that each
reader essentially participates in the making of a poem or novel is not, he shows, an invitation
to unchecked subjectivity and to the endless proliferation of competing interpretations. For
each reader approaches a literary work not as an isolated individual but as part of a community
of readers. 'Indeed," he writes, "it is interpretive communities, rather than either the text or
reader, that produce meanings."
• The book is developmental, not static. Fish at all times reveals the evolutionary aspect of his
work--the manner in which he has assumed new positions, altered them, and then moved
on. Previously published essays are introduced by headnotes which relate them to the central
notion of interpretive communities as it emerges in the final chapters. In the course of refining
his theory, Fish includes rather than excludes the thinking of other critics and shows how
often they agree with him, even when he and they may appear to be most dramatically at
odds. Engaging, lucid, provocative, this book will immediately find its place among the
seminal works of modern literary criticism.

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