Page 66 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Fish defines his "informed reader" as having the following qualities: "The informed reader is
someone who (1) is a competent speaker of the language out of which the text is built up; (2) is in
full possession of 'the semantic knowledge that a mature . . . listener brings to his task of
comprehension,' and (3) has literary competence".
This emphasis on the importance of the reader in the creation of meaning in texts raises objections
among the formalists, among them William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley.
The Verbal Icon(1954) contains the following passage:
The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)
. . . It begins by trying to derive the standards of criticism from the psychological effects of the
poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome . . . is that the poem itself, as an
object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.
Fish answers this by saying, "My reply to this is simple. The objectivity of the text is an illusion
and, moreover, a dangerous illusion, because it is so physically convincing. . . . A line of print is
so obviously there . . . that it seems to be the sole repository of whatever value and meaning we
associate with it" . To Fish, the poem can't disappear because it was never actually there in the first
place except as a reflection of the interpretive strategy used to approach it.
Fish contends that those formal features are themselves interpretations and so any interpretation
based on them is illegitimate. He does not deny the importance of formal features, but in his essay
"What is Stylistics and Why are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?," he asserts that rather
than possessing any particular meaning in and of themselves, these features ". . . acquire it . . . by
virtue of their position in a structure of experience" . In other words, the reader brings his particular
interpretive strategy (a product of his cumulative experiences) to the text and creates meaning out
of the pattern of formal features that are found within it. He strengthens this argument in "What
is Stylistics, Part II":

Fish's theory rejects the claims of the New Critics (formalists) that the work itself
contains meaning that can be derived by a study of its formal features.

"Here my thesis is that formal patterns are themselves the products of interpretation and that
therefore there is no such thing as a formal pattern, at least in the sense necessary for the practice
of stylistics: that is no pattern that one can observe before interpretation is hazarded and which
therefore can be used to prefer one interpretation to another. The conclusion, however, is not that
there are no formal patterns but that there are always formal patterns; it is just that the formal
patterns there always are will always be the product of a prior interpretive act, and therefore will
be available for discerning only so long as that act is in force".
This theory ran into trouble, however, because Fish was at once denying that meaning was in the
text and at the same time using the text to control the reader's experience. He begins to address
this problem in "How Ordinary is Ordinary Language?" by proposing that the reader actually
makes the text by bringing to it certain assumptions that are a product of his "informedness." By
this he doesn't mean that the reader can make up any meaning he wants. On the contrary, he
states, "Mine is not an argument for an infinitely plural or open text, but for a text that is always
set; and yet because it is set not for all places or all times but for wherever and however long a
particular way of reading [interpretation] is in force, it is a text that can change".
Still, this seems to point out a lack of stability and consistency in interpretation that is contradicted
by the fact that so many readers come up with the same general "take" on the same texts. Fish
addresses this question in "Interpreting the Variorum." He asks: "If interpretive acts are the source of
forms rather than the other way around, why isn't it the case that readers are always performing the
same acts or a sequence of random acts, and therefore creating the same forms or a random succession
of forms?" . He goes on to say, " . . . both the stability of interpretation among readers and the variety

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