Page 78 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes other hand, the book was praised as helping to revive, through wit and word play, the rather
weary state of current legal discourse. Critics also reacted strongly to Professional Correctness.
While Fish's case that the university holds the most promise as a site for intellectual integrity was
accepted, critics argued that he was incorrect in pointing to the academic world as the source of its
own potential demise, instead locating the danger in the contemporary political climate; in any
case, "professionalism" was not expected by critics to save the day. The Trouble with Principle
again caught the attention of reviewers, who pointed out Fish's methods for exposing the actual
lack of neutrality in the "democratic discourse" of liberals. Fish's opposition to the "principles" of
liberalism, however, was not found to be either original in its stance or conclusive in terms of
supplying a remedy for the current political state. Despite the criticisms found in response to the
author's claims, Fish is known as an insightful critic of contemporary culture, one certainly not
timid about potentially drawing the ire of his peers; whether they agree with him or not, critics
have recognized Fish for the energetic creativity of his thought.
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Reading is an ............... .
(a) Art (b) Activity
(c) Interpretations (d) None of these
(ii) Who was referred as the New Readers by Meyesr Abrams ............... ?
(a) Jacques Derrida (b) Harold Bloom
(c) Stanley Fish (d) All of these
(iii) Hirsch’s Sentence is constrained by the meanings words have in a ............... .
(a) Socio-linguistic system (b) Psycho-linguistics system
(c) Normative linguistic system (d) None of these
(iv) ‘The air is’ referred as ............... .
(a) Mild (b) Short
(c) Crisp (d) None of these

6.5 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

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