Stanley Fish

Stanley Eugene Fish (born 1938) is a prominent American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He is among the most important critics of the English poet John Milton in the 20th century, and is often associated with postmodernism, at times to his irritation as he describes himself as an anti-foundationalist.[1] He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a Professor of Law at Florida International University, in Miami, as well as Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of 10 books. Professor Fish has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University.

Academic career

Fish did his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania [2] and earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1962. He taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before becoming Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke University from 1986 to 1998. From 1999 to 2004 he was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice, and was Chair of the Religious Studies Committee [3]. During his tenure there, he recruited "big name" professors and garnered a lot of attention for the College [4]. After resigning as dean in a high level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC [5], Fish spent a year teaching in the Department of English. The Institute for the Humanities at UIC named a lecture series in his honor, which is still ongoing [6]. In June of 2005, he accepted the position of Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University, teaching in the FIU College of Law.

Milton

Fish started his career as a medievalist. Despite this, his first book, published by Yale University Press in 1965, was on the Renaissance poet John Skelton. Fish reveals in his partly biographical essay, "Milton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour" (published in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech... And It's a Good Thing, Too), that he came to Milton by accident. In 1963 — the same year that Fish started as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley — the resident Miltonist, C.A. Patrides, received a grant. The chair of the department asked Fish to teach the Milton course, notwithstanding the fact that the young professor "had never — either as an undergraduate or in graduate school — taken a Milton course" (269). The eventual result of that course was Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; rpt. 1997). Fish's 2001 book, How Milton Works, reflects five decades' worth of his scholarship on Milton.

Interpretive communities

As a literary theorist, Fish is best known for his analysis of interpretive communities — an offshoot of reader-response criticism. Fish's work in this field examines how the interpretation of a text is dependent upon each reader's own subjective experience in one or more communities, each of which is defined as a 'community' by a distinct epistemology. For Fish, a large part of what renders a reader’s subjective experience valuable—that is, why it may be considered “constrained” as opposed to an uncontrolled and idiosyncratic assertion of the self—comes from a concept native to the field of linguistics called linguistic competence. In Fish’s source the term is explained as “the idea that it is possible to characterize a linguistic system that every speaker shares.” In the context of literary criticism, Fish uses this concept to argue that a reader’s approach to a text is not completely subjective, and that an internalized understanding of language shared by the native speakers of that given language makes possible the creation of normative boundaries for one’s experience with language.

Although Fish argues that the only possible meaning of a text is what the author intends, he claims that any actual attempt to access this is not possible. Any attempt to determine what exactly the author intended will result in nothing more than an interpretation based upon the interpretive community of the reader making the interpretation. Fish distinguishes the former as an epistemological point about what texts mean, whereas the latter is a sociological one about how claims about those meanings are produced. Surprising how I can't describe that which I try to criticise.

Criticism

In her essay "Sophistry about Conventions," Martha Nussbaum argues that Stanley Fish's theoretical views are based on "extreme relativism and even radical subjectivism." Discounting his work as nothing more than sophistry, Nussbaum claims that Fish "relies on the regulative principle of non-contradiction in order to adjudicate between competing principles," thereby relying on normative standards of argumentation even as he argues against them. Offering an alternative, Nussbaum cites John Rawls's work in A Theory of Justice to highlight "an example of a rational argument; it can be said to yield, in a perfectly recognizable sense, ethical truth." Nussbaum appropriates Rawls's critique of the insufficiencies of Utilitarianism, showing that a rational person will consistently prefer a system of justice that acknowledges boundaries between separate persons rather than relying on the aggregation of the sum total of desires. "This," she claims, "is all together different from rhetorical manipulation."

Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae, denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogenous and sheltered ivory tower of Duke.

David Hirsch, a prominent critic of post-structuralist influences on hermeneutics, censured Fish for "lapses in logical rigor" and "carelessness toward rhetorical precision." In an examination of Fish's arguments, Hirsch attempts to demonstrate that "not only was a restoration of New Critical methods unnecessary, but that Fish himself had not managed to rid himself of the shackles of New Critical theory." Hirsch compares Fish's work to Penelope's loom in the Odyssey, stating, "what one critic weaves by day, another unweaves by night." "Nor," he writes, "does this weaving and unweaving constitute a dialectic, since no forward movement takes place." Ultimately, Hirsche sees Fish as left to "wander in his own Elysian fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."

Fish and university politics

A prominent public intellectual and a hard man to pin down politically, Fish has spent considerable time in various public arenas vigorously debunking pieties of both the left and the right — sometimes in the same sentence.

In addition to his work in literary criticism, Fish has also written extensively on the politics of the university, having taken positions justifying campus speech codes and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise.

Fish participated in a forum regarding the proper role of universities, which appeared in the September 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine; the article, in which Fish appeared alongside notable academics David Gelernter, Lani Guinier, and Elizabeth Hoffman, was entitled "Affirmative Reaction: When Campus Republicans Play the Diversity Card."

Fish has lectured across the country at many universities and colleges including Brown University, Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Vermont, the University of Georgia, the University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky, and Bates College, recently.

Notes and references

“Interpretive Assumptions and Interpreted Texts: On a Poem by Stanley Fish,” Essays in Literature, 11 (1984), 145-52.

Bibliography

Primary works by Stanley Fish

• John Skelton's Poetry. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1965.
• Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1967. ISBN 0-674-85747-X (10). ISBN 978-0-674-85747-6 (13).
• Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1972.
• "Interpreting the Variorum." Critical Inquiry (1976).
• "Why We Can't All Just Get Along." First Things (1996).
• The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1978.
• Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. ISBN 0-674-467264 (10). ISBN 978-067-4467262 (13).

• Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1989.

• Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1999.
• The Trouble with Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.
• How Milton Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001.

Collections of works by Stanley Fish

• There's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

The title essay and an additional essay, "Jerry Falwell's Mother," focus on free speech issues. In the latter piece, Fish argues that, if one has some answer in mind to the question "what is free speech good for?" along the lines of "in the free and open clash of viewpoints the truth can more readily be known," then it makes no sense to defend deliberate malicious libel (such as that which was at issue in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell) in the name of "free speech."

• The Stanley Fish Reader. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

Secondary criticism about Stanley Fish

• Olson, Gary A. Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric. Albany: SUNY P, 2002.
• Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise. Ed. Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2004.
• Owen, J. Judd. Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism. Chapters 6-8 and "Appendix: A Reply to Stanley Fish." University of Chicago Press, 2001.
• Perez-Firmat, Gustavo: “Interpretive Assumptions and Interpreted Texts: On a Poem by Stanley Fish,” Essays in Literature, 11 (1984), 145-52.

See also

• Formalism
• New Criticism

External links

• Interview with Stanley Fish published in The minnesota review March 3, 2000. Accessed December 23, 2006.
• "Leading Professor Stanley Fish to Join FIU Law Faculty." Press release. Florida International University. June 29, 2005.
• Stanley Fish article published in the Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism.
• Stanley Fish. Florida International University Law School faculty biography.
• Stanley Fish's blog at The New York Times Editorial section.
• Stanley Fish on Deconstruction. Radio interview with orogram host, Hugh LaFollette. WETS-FM. University of San Francisco. n.d. (Audio link.)
• Stanley Fish Resources Center. A self-published non-official website with links to various texts by and about Stanley Fish. Accessed December 23, 2006.