Page 69 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 6: Is There a Text In This Class—Stanley Fish: Analysis

6.2 Theory of Stanley Fish Notes

At this point I would like to take a closer look at Stanley Fish's reader-response theory. It is my
intent first to examine Fish's literary theory before criticizing it and then tie it in more broadly
with the privatization of meaning and other phenomena occurring in philosophy and society
which I will argue are historically conditioned. In other words, Fish's thesis is influenced by
existential notions of truth and the rise of modernism/post-modernism.
The phenomenological method has much to commend itself to us as it focuses on what happens in
the reader's mind as he or she reads. Fish applies this method in his early work "Surprised by Sin:
The Reader in Paradise Lost." His thesis in this work is that Milton used a number of literary
techniques intentionally to lead the reader into a false sense of security whereupon he would
effect a turn from the reader's expectations in order to surprise the reader with his own prideful
self-sufficiency. The supposed intent of Milton was to force the reader to see his own sinfulness in
a new light and be forced back to God's grace. Fish's thesis is a rather ingenious approach to
Paradise Lost and to Milton's (mis)leading of the reader.
Fish's concern at this point in his career is with what "is really happening in the act of reading,"
and this is reflected in his compilations of essays entitled Is There a Text in This Class? especially
the first half. Fish defines his own phenomenological approach as "an analysis of the developing
responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time. His concern
is with what the text does as opposed to what it means. As J. F. Worthen suggests, much of his
work can be seen as a reaction against the formalism that characterized the age of New Critical
theory which held that meaning was embedded in the textual artifact or, as Wimsatt and Beardsley
referred to it, "the object". He suggests that, "The context for the discussion is the question of
whether formal features exist prior to and independently of interpretive strategies." As one might
imagine Fish eventually offers a negative response to this question. He posits that rather than
having a text that contains formal features identifiable in all times and places that it is the reader
that projects these features onto the text, thereby also answering "No" to the question, "Is there a
text in this class?"
From this point in Fish's career his theories evolve into a form of criticism that rejects the author's
intentionally and places meaning solely within the arena of those receiving the text. Thus his
theory is sometimes called "reception aesthetics" or "affective stylistics." Fish claims that it is the
interpretive community that creates its own reality. It is the community that invests a text, or for
that matter life itself, with meaning. Those who claim that meaning is to be found in some eternal
superstructure or substructure of reality he labels "foundationalists." Naturally, because
foundationalists comprise their own interpretive communities and interpret through such a grid,
they will be opposed to theories such as his own. His theory is epistemological in that it deals not
so much with literary criticism (although the implications for such are tremendous) as with how
one comes to know. In the following analysis of Fish's theory I will focus primarily on his later
reader-response theory.

There are really two kinds of reader-response criticism: one is a phenomenological
approach to reading which characterizes much of Fish's earlier work, and the
other is an epistemological theory characteristic of Fish's later work.

6.3 Stanley Fish: "Is There a Text In This Class?"

On the first day of the new semester, a colleague at Johns Hopkins University was approached by
a student who, as it turned out, had just taken a course from me. She put to him what I think you
would agree is a perfectly straightforward question: "Is there a text in this class?" Responding with
a confidence so perfect that he was unaware of it (although in telling the story, he refers to this

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