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Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
Stanley Fish is one of America's most stimulating literary theorists. In this new book, he undertakes a profound reexamination of some of criticisms most basic assumptions.
408 pages, Hardcover
First published November 28, 1980
26 people are currently reading
769 people want to read
About the author
Stanley Fish
66 books120 followersStanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He is often associated with postmodernism, at times to his irritation, as he describes himself as an anti-foundationalist.
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, Columbia University, and Duke University.
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, Columbia University, and Duke University.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
September 21, 2016
The subtitle of this book ought to be "Stanley Fish Deconstructs Himself".
This is a collection of essays on literary theory by literary critic Stanley Fish. The book is interesting throughout, but of particular interest is how it is organized. Fish states, right from the introduction, that the perspective from which the bulk of the essays was written is wrong.
Fish began his journey into literary theory as a reader-response theorist. That is, he believed that there is no objective text, but the text is created through the experience of reading. He then made several moves to sidestep the radical implications of this theory; drawing on psychology and Chomsky's universal grammar to try and thread the needle between saying there is one strictly correct reading, and there are no correct readings.
In the introduction to the book, Fish says that this move implicitly reintroduced the text as the objective factor; in creating a stable, if flexible, reading experience, he was all but recreating the notion of a stable text. So any time he advanced arguments which effectively undermined the partisans of stable texts, he also undermined his own position.
The introduction fleshes out not only his mistakes, but how they led him to the conclusion ultimately embraced in the last quarter to a third of the book. As the actual subtitle implies, he centers his theory on interpretative communities. In a way readers create texts, but it is more accurate to say that communities create the conditions for creating texts---and yet more accurate to say that communities create both readers and texts. I will not here delve into the subtleties of this argument, which is well worth the price of admission, but Fish advances it masterfully.
In creating a book that centers so much on reader experience, Fish also cultivated a unique experience for his reader. The deconstruction of his journey in the introduction is followed by opening statements at the beginning of each essay, talking about the circumstances, strengths, and fatal flaws of what you are about to read. This created a useful tension for me---I could see problems straightaway, but I wasn't sure if I was seeing them because they were obvious or because Fish had given them away from the start.
Progressing through the book feels much like watching someone work out a problem by sketching solutions again and again. The reader-response section shifts subtly as you go along, in response to criticisms he received at the time. He also includes an interesting discussion of Speech Act Theory, which is an excellent essay in its own right. In general I felt the pleasure of seeing a clearly intellectually curious person attending to their own growth, and owning the mistakes made along the way.
It does not hurt that Fish is an excellent stylist, bringing wit and bravado into the dry subject of literary theory. And once you have done the work of following through his reader-response phase, you can more plainly see how interpretive communities sweep away a lot of conceptual problems. Of course, they also create problems of their own---but the structure of the book leads me to believe that that is exactly what he wanted you to see.
If you wanted to dip your toes into literary theory, or have ever wondered about the nature of meaning, you could do worse than starting here.
This is a collection of essays on literary theory by literary critic Stanley Fish. The book is interesting throughout, but of particular interest is how it is organized. Fish states, right from the introduction, that the perspective from which the bulk of the essays was written is wrong.
Fish began his journey into literary theory as a reader-response theorist. That is, he believed that there is no objective text, but the text is created through the experience of reading. He then made several moves to sidestep the radical implications of this theory; drawing on psychology and Chomsky's universal grammar to try and thread the needle between saying there is one strictly correct reading, and there are no correct readings.
In the introduction to the book, Fish says that this move implicitly reintroduced the text as the objective factor; in creating a stable, if flexible, reading experience, he was all but recreating the notion of a stable text. So any time he advanced arguments which effectively undermined the partisans of stable texts, he also undermined his own position.
The introduction fleshes out not only his mistakes, but how they led him to the conclusion ultimately embraced in the last quarter to a third of the book. As the actual subtitle implies, he centers his theory on interpretative communities. In a way readers create texts, but it is more accurate to say that communities create the conditions for creating texts---and yet more accurate to say that communities create both readers and texts. I will not here delve into the subtleties of this argument, which is well worth the price of admission, but Fish advances it masterfully.
In creating a book that centers so much on reader experience, Fish also cultivated a unique experience for his reader. The deconstruction of his journey in the introduction is followed by opening statements at the beginning of each essay, talking about the circumstances, strengths, and fatal flaws of what you are about to read. This created a useful tension for me---I could see problems straightaway, but I wasn't sure if I was seeing them because they were obvious or because Fish had given them away from the start.
Progressing through the book feels much like watching someone work out a problem by sketching solutions again and again. The reader-response section shifts subtly as you go along, in response to criticisms he received at the time. He also includes an interesting discussion of Speech Act Theory, which is an excellent essay in its own right. In general I felt the pleasure of seeing a clearly intellectually curious person attending to their own growth, and owning the mistakes made along the way.
It does not hurt that Fish is an excellent stylist, bringing wit and bravado into the dry subject of literary theory. And once you have done the work of following through his reader-response phase, you can more plainly see how interpretive communities sweep away a lot of conceptual problems. Of course, they also create problems of their own---but the structure of the book leads me to believe that that is exactly what he wanted you to see.
If you wanted to dip your toes into literary theory, or have ever wondered about the nature of meaning, you could do worse than starting here.
August 13, 2024
3.5 stars, maybe?
When I mentioned in a conversation the other day that I had just finished reading this book, a friend who has studied this said: “Stanley Fish is very seductive.” That captures well how I feel at the moment — I am engaged, even entranced at times by Fish’s command of language and his ability to respond to and expand an idea, but when I step outside of his precisely ordered lines of thought, I find myself echoing elements, perhaps, but not much (not yet, at least) of the whole.
On the structure of the text: This is a collection of essays organized on the topic of the reader’s relationship to the text and how this is worked out in literary criticism, many prefaced by Fish’s analysis of his own work past the essays’ original publication. Fish concludes with several chapters building out the notion of “interpretive communities,” a concept presented as a resolution of some of the inconsistencies he self-identifies in previous essays. The collection, taken as a whole, charts his progress in developing his contributions to literary criticism — this, I think, is well done, even as it softens the blow of the more stinging critiques he levels against other writers. I doubt it could have been structured more sensibly, but I will say that I would have liked to get to the last set of chapters more quickly. They most clearly articulate his theories, where prior essays are mostly a demonstration of these in handling literature or else his responses to contemporary disagreement.
I really enjoyed this quite a bit, even though I am not especially practiced at reading theory and had to take the essays in measured doses. Other Goodreads reviewers have characterized Fish as arrogant, and I agree — he writes with the assumption that one is held captive by his reasoning. This is not wrong, because he is a brilliant writer, and as I read, I wanted to be convinced. I found his style of storytelling and rhetorical sleights of hand amusing, if dry. I liked the essays that were samples of his own literary readings of Milton’s poetry or speech-act theory in Shakespeare, even when his analysis was beyond me (it would probably help to actually read L’Allegro or Coriolanus).
However, I also have several hesitations. Although some broadly concern what I consider the weaknesses of reader-response theory, I am not wholly convinced by the particular solutions Fish proposes, seductive though they might be. I am most interested in: first, the relativism problem and whether interpretive communities answer here, and second, the relationship of authorial intent and determinate meaning to the stability of a text.
First, Fish writes explicitly to counter formalist concerns about reader-response criticism as inevitably leading to a descent into relativism, which is, for good reason, the main argument against reader-response theory. If the reader, in interpreting a text, is responsible for constructing its meaning, then there is no accountability and a reader can go off and develop all manner of meaning from all manner of readings. To safeguard against problems of solipsism, Fish proposes the notion of “interpretive communities,” which are characterized by shared sets of interpretive strategies. Interpretation is always happening, he says — there is no way not to play the game, and there is no way not to play it in the absence of an interpretive community. At a more basic level, no interpretation happens independently, because no instance of communication happens independently. Every instance of language occurs within systems that are governed by assorted norms and values, these mostly tacitly known. They are specific to and shaped by particular contexts, but also beyond the control of the individual. No individual reader, then, can isolate oneself so thoroughly from communication norms such as to have a totally individual reading of any text — there is no ambiguous, undefined space that is either pure language in the absence of interpretation or where any possible reading can be legitimate.
I think Fish is absolutely right in that language is informed by structures well below the surface, and instances of it never take place absent of context and many levels of meaning. In his model, no one can ever get to a purely relativistic reading of a text, because it will always take place within an interpretive community. However, I am not convinced that interpretive communities sufficiently safeguard against a less extreme form of relativism. I also don’t think that Abrams, Hirsch, et. al are concerned about the possibility of some pure relativistic reading — the concern is much more quotidian, about ordinary interpretive exercises and their failures. An example of this could be the story with which Fish opens Chapter 14, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.” Fish describes a classroom exercise in which he writes a list of the names of several linguistic theorists on the blackboard and tells his students that it’s a poem. They then construct interpretations of it, coming up with what it could be doing as a poem. By asking his students to read a list of names as not a list of names but as a poem charged with religious undertones, Fish invites the students into a particular interpretive community. He offers the story as a demonstration of his theory that interpretive structures and strategies shape the meaning of a given text more than the text itself does.
Again, I think there’s some truth to this, but also, this isn’t being fair to the best version of interpretation, and this is what people worry about when they worry about reader-response criticism! This example shows what an interpretive community might look like in action, certainly, but it doesn’t endear the concept to me. For one thing, this makes interpretive communities seem restrictive, not liberating. Fish controls the community and the context in which his students operate and interpret. Even if a student were to recognize a couple of the names and realize what’s going on, what is that student supposed to do — refuse to participate in the assignment? Challenge Fish as the instructor? This suggests to me that interpretation in Fish’s model relies on selecting a source of authority and deriving interpretive strategies from that source, but that source, for some reason, can’t be the text itself.
This leads into my second objection, which is that I have a hard time assessing precisely what Fish wants us to think about determinate meaning in a text. He seems to walk back over the course of this book the hardline stance at the outset that there is no determinate meaning in a text. Possibly he does not want us to toss out all authorial intent, just to grant the reader more authority in constructing meaning. Initially, I thought Fish’s theory went hand-in-hand with Roland Barthes’s work on the “death of the author.” I think now I would revise that position — Fish proposes something less radical. Barthes would have us discard the author’s context in favor of constructing meaning from the reader’s conversation with the text. Fish would have us treat the text as not itself determinate in creating meaning, but he would not necessarily have us put the author to death, just the finality of the text as determined by the author.
Even if Fish cares more about authorial intent than I’m currently giving him credit for, I think I still just have a much higher view of what it means to be an artist. It seems really unfortunate not to conceive of authors as having something to communicate that might be at times beyond readers’ ability to interpret from their own knowledge. I don’t buy all the way into Romanticism or think that every piece of art must necessarily be an invitation into transcendence by virtue of its form. There is a lot of trivial, trashy art in the world. Sometimes it serves another purpose than transcendence. But, as a Christian reader and artist, following Tolkien and Fujimura and various authors and theologians, I have a very strong view of the artist as sub-creator, as one who draws on and out of the Imago Dei. It seems difficult to hold this view together with one that diminishes authorial and artistic intent. Fish says, as part of his classroom example, about poems and lists as fundamentally the same artifacts: “The conclusion, therefore, is that all objects are made and not found, and that they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion” (331). To that, I say: Excuse me?? Perhaps this is not precisely where Fish intends this idea to lead, but this application of reader-response theory leaves very little room for a high regard for artistic vision. An author writes to convey something that might be much larger than a given reader can construct. I would say that does not reduce the author’s vision to ashes. If no reader ever gets anywhere, that is one problem. But most of the time, readers know how to distinguish between a sonnet and a grocery list, and that is at least in part because of the artist’s creative effort — the ability to make that distinction does not lie, I think, entirely with reader ability. Authorial intent seems clearly to matter. I just can’t tell whether, or how much, it matters to Fish.
One thing I did appreciate was Fish’s conception of the act of interpretation as temporal, an event in time, and not as spatial, a fixed point. This relates to what I actually also like about Barthes — “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” A text ought to expand, to yield a larger conversation. I am not arguing against reader participation, and I actually quite like a lot of the ways in which Fish allows the reader more freedom in interpretation. I love to think of reading and interpreting as a temporal event, as a conversation that is not necessarily closed by what Barthes calls a “final signified” (even if I don’t think the context of the author’s writing is necessarily that). That said, I’d propose a model more like a Platonic dialogue. Socrates is always instructing, framing the whole conversation even when he is not directly lecturing. Even the questions he asks are always in service of a truth he has already examined and desires for his student to reach. The student is expanding his own knowledge, but only because the teacher gets him there. Even when there appears to be a back-and-forth, an exchange between equals, it’s always uneven in authority, always mediated by the teacher’s superior knowledge. One might, as a reader, be able to get more out of a text than the author anticipated, and that meaning could be valid and useful. But even that flows from the conversation the author began and therefore, takes place to some degree on the author’s terms. To view a text as something separate from myself seems vital for proper intellectual humility. The point of a text is for a reader to interpret it — but not, I think, in so doing, to feel free to totally depart from it!
Ultimately, I am unsure where Fish leaves us when it comes to the actual practice of interpretation. He anticipates this argument a bit at the end, saying in the final chapter that not everything has to be immediately practical to be interesting. This is true, but I think it’s a cop-out, especially for someone who claims that “interpretation is the only game in town” (355). I would like at least something to work with, and Fish does not offer much. This is a very reductive dichotomy, but it feels as though I am left with: 1) readers are informed by social, tacitly known norms, so we don’t have to be concerned about their going off the rails and should trust them to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling; and/or 2) readers are informed by interpretive strategies, so the way to play the interpretive game as an instructor is to control the interpretive environment by supplying all the strategies from one’s own interpretive standpoint, that being superior to the authority of the text.
I admire Fish’s project, because he’s doing something interesting with the practical working-out of reader-response theory and interpretation. Our responses to a text will always be mediated by our personal experience and by the communities in which we read them, and this can help us from being isolated in our interpretation. I like this, and I like how Fish has articulated it. I think he describes effectively the structure of interpretation and identifies correctly that in reading a text, one is always playing the game of interpretation; beyond that, in encountering language, one is always playing the game of interpretation. I am just not yet convinced that interpretive communities solve the problems posed by discarding the notion of a stable text — or that, if interpretation is the only game in town, Fish has done more than describe the playing field.
When I mentioned in a conversation the other day that I had just finished reading this book, a friend who has studied this said: “Stanley Fish is very seductive.” That captures well how I feel at the moment — I am engaged, even entranced at times by Fish’s command of language and his ability to respond to and expand an idea, but when I step outside of his precisely ordered lines of thought, I find myself echoing elements, perhaps, but not much (not yet, at least) of the whole.
On the structure of the text: This is a collection of essays organized on the topic of the reader’s relationship to the text and how this is worked out in literary criticism, many prefaced by Fish’s analysis of his own work past the essays’ original publication. Fish concludes with several chapters building out the notion of “interpretive communities,” a concept presented as a resolution of some of the inconsistencies he self-identifies in previous essays. The collection, taken as a whole, charts his progress in developing his contributions to literary criticism — this, I think, is well done, even as it softens the blow of the more stinging critiques he levels against other writers. I doubt it could have been structured more sensibly, but I will say that I would have liked to get to the last set of chapters more quickly. They most clearly articulate his theories, where prior essays are mostly a demonstration of these in handling literature or else his responses to contemporary disagreement.
I really enjoyed this quite a bit, even though I am not especially practiced at reading theory and had to take the essays in measured doses. Other Goodreads reviewers have characterized Fish as arrogant, and I agree — he writes with the assumption that one is held captive by his reasoning. This is not wrong, because he is a brilliant writer, and as I read, I wanted to be convinced. I found his style of storytelling and rhetorical sleights of hand amusing, if dry. I liked the essays that were samples of his own literary readings of Milton’s poetry or speech-act theory in Shakespeare, even when his analysis was beyond me (it would probably help to actually read L’Allegro or Coriolanus).
However, I also have several hesitations. Although some broadly concern what I consider the weaknesses of reader-response theory, I am not wholly convinced by the particular solutions Fish proposes, seductive though they might be. I am most interested in: first, the relativism problem and whether interpretive communities answer here, and second, the relationship of authorial intent and determinate meaning to the stability of a text.
First, Fish writes explicitly to counter formalist concerns about reader-response criticism as inevitably leading to a descent into relativism, which is, for good reason, the main argument against reader-response theory. If the reader, in interpreting a text, is responsible for constructing its meaning, then there is no accountability and a reader can go off and develop all manner of meaning from all manner of readings. To safeguard against problems of solipsism, Fish proposes the notion of “interpretive communities,” which are characterized by shared sets of interpretive strategies. Interpretation is always happening, he says — there is no way not to play the game, and there is no way not to play it in the absence of an interpretive community. At a more basic level, no interpretation happens independently, because no instance of communication happens independently. Every instance of language occurs within systems that are governed by assorted norms and values, these mostly tacitly known. They are specific to and shaped by particular contexts, but also beyond the control of the individual. No individual reader, then, can isolate oneself so thoroughly from communication norms such as to have a totally individual reading of any text — there is no ambiguous, undefined space that is either pure language in the absence of interpretation or where any possible reading can be legitimate.
I think Fish is absolutely right in that language is informed by structures well below the surface, and instances of it never take place absent of context and many levels of meaning. In his model, no one can ever get to a purely relativistic reading of a text, because it will always take place within an interpretive community. However, I am not convinced that interpretive communities sufficiently safeguard against a less extreme form of relativism. I also don’t think that Abrams, Hirsch, et. al are concerned about the possibility of some pure relativistic reading — the concern is much more quotidian, about ordinary interpretive exercises and their failures. An example of this could be the story with which Fish opens Chapter 14, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.” Fish describes a classroom exercise in which he writes a list of the names of several linguistic theorists on the blackboard and tells his students that it’s a poem. They then construct interpretations of it, coming up with what it could be doing as a poem. By asking his students to read a list of names as not a list of names but as a poem charged with religious undertones, Fish invites the students into a particular interpretive community. He offers the story as a demonstration of his theory that interpretive structures and strategies shape the meaning of a given text more than the text itself does.
Again, I think there’s some truth to this, but also, this isn’t being fair to the best version of interpretation, and this is what people worry about when they worry about reader-response criticism! This example shows what an interpretive community might look like in action, certainly, but it doesn’t endear the concept to me. For one thing, this makes interpretive communities seem restrictive, not liberating. Fish controls the community and the context in which his students operate and interpret. Even if a student were to recognize a couple of the names and realize what’s going on, what is that student supposed to do — refuse to participate in the assignment? Challenge Fish as the instructor? This suggests to me that interpretation in Fish’s model relies on selecting a source of authority and deriving interpretive strategies from that source, but that source, for some reason, can’t be the text itself.
This leads into my second objection, which is that I have a hard time assessing precisely what Fish wants us to think about determinate meaning in a text. He seems to walk back over the course of this book the hardline stance at the outset that there is no determinate meaning in a text. Possibly he does not want us to toss out all authorial intent, just to grant the reader more authority in constructing meaning. Initially, I thought Fish’s theory went hand-in-hand with Roland Barthes’s work on the “death of the author.” I think now I would revise that position — Fish proposes something less radical. Barthes would have us discard the author’s context in favor of constructing meaning from the reader’s conversation with the text. Fish would have us treat the text as not itself determinate in creating meaning, but he would not necessarily have us put the author to death, just the finality of the text as determined by the author.
Even if Fish cares more about authorial intent than I’m currently giving him credit for, I think I still just have a much higher view of what it means to be an artist. It seems really unfortunate not to conceive of authors as having something to communicate that might be at times beyond readers’ ability to interpret from their own knowledge. I don’t buy all the way into Romanticism or think that every piece of art must necessarily be an invitation into transcendence by virtue of its form. There is a lot of trivial, trashy art in the world. Sometimes it serves another purpose than transcendence. But, as a Christian reader and artist, following Tolkien and Fujimura and various authors and theologians, I have a very strong view of the artist as sub-creator, as one who draws on and out of the Imago Dei. It seems difficult to hold this view together with one that diminishes authorial and artistic intent. Fish says, as part of his classroom example, about poems and lists as fundamentally the same artifacts: “The conclusion, therefore, is that all objects are made and not found, and that they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion” (331). To that, I say: Excuse me?? Perhaps this is not precisely where Fish intends this idea to lead, but this application of reader-response theory leaves very little room for a high regard for artistic vision. An author writes to convey something that might be much larger than a given reader can construct. I would say that does not reduce the author’s vision to ashes. If no reader ever gets anywhere, that is one problem. But most of the time, readers know how to distinguish between a sonnet and a grocery list, and that is at least in part because of the artist’s creative effort — the ability to make that distinction does not lie, I think, entirely with reader ability. Authorial intent seems clearly to matter. I just can’t tell whether, or how much, it matters to Fish.
One thing I did appreciate was Fish’s conception of the act of interpretation as temporal, an event in time, and not as spatial, a fixed point. This relates to what I actually also like about Barthes — “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” A text ought to expand, to yield a larger conversation. I am not arguing against reader participation, and I actually quite like a lot of the ways in which Fish allows the reader more freedom in interpretation. I love to think of reading and interpreting as a temporal event, as a conversation that is not necessarily closed by what Barthes calls a “final signified” (even if I don’t think the context of the author’s writing is necessarily that). That said, I’d propose a model more like a Platonic dialogue. Socrates is always instructing, framing the whole conversation even when he is not directly lecturing. Even the questions he asks are always in service of a truth he has already examined and desires for his student to reach. The student is expanding his own knowledge, but only because the teacher gets him there. Even when there appears to be a back-and-forth, an exchange between equals, it’s always uneven in authority, always mediated by the teacher’s superior knowledge. One might, as a reader, be able to get more out of a text than the author anticipated, and that meaning could be valid and useful. But even that flows from the conversation the author began and therefore, takes place to some degree on the author’s terms. To view a text as something separate from myself seems vital for proper intellectual humility. The point of a text is for a reader to interpret it — but not, I think, in so doing, to feel free to totally depart from it!
Ultimately, I am unsure where Fish leaves us when it comes to the actual practice of interpretation. He anticipates this argument a bit at the end, saying in the final chapter that not everything has to be immediately practical to be interesting. This is true, but I think it’s a cop-out, especially for someone who claims that “interpretation is the only game in town” (355). I would like at least something to work with, and Fish does not offer much. This is a very reductive dichotomy, but it feels as though I am left with: 1) readers are informed by social, tacitly known norms, so we don’t have to be concerned about their going off the rails and should trust them to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling; and/or 2) readers are informed by interpretive strategies, so the way to play the interpretive game as an instructor is to control the interpretive environment by supplying all the strategies from one’s own interpretive standpoint, that being superior to the authority of the text.
I admire Fish’s project, because he’s doing something interesting with the practical working-out of reader-response theory and interpretation. Our responses to a text will always be mediated by our personal experience and by the communities in which we read them, and this can help us from being isolated in our interpretation. I like this, and I like how Fish has articulated it. I think he describes effectively the structure of interpretation and identifies correctly that in reading a text, one is always playing the game of interpretation; beyond that, in encountering language, one is always playing the game of interpretation. I am just not yet convinced that interpretive communities solve the problems posed by discarding the notion of a stable text — or that, if interpretation is the only game in town, Fish has done more than describe the playing field.
November 22, 2013
Stanley Fish is an arrogant ass, but he is also quite brilliant. That's really all I have to say about that for now. I may write an actual, DECENT review later, but for now, I'm just too tired.
January 26, 2026
My second Fish book. And it's definitely not my favorite, as I found too much of it to be geared more toward an academic audience than "There's No Such Thing as Free Speech..." Not Stanley's fault. Mine. I didn't read any reviews going in; I just requested what was available from Fish via our local library. This one was the winner.
Here's the text of a review that I found both helpful and accurate. Like its author, I also count myself a member of Fish's school. Its penultimate paragraph reads:
"'Is There a Text in This Class?' is a substantial achievement which deserves the serious consideration of all students of literature. Its arguments are cogent, forceful and engaging, its style is witty, personable and unpretentious, and its analyses are just, incisive and economical. Most important, the theory it advocates is provocative, comprehensive and, I believe, true."
And then the rest of the review:
Is There a Text in This Class?
by Paul Strohm
In the following review of Is There a Text in This Class?, Strohm provides a summary of Fish's critical arguments and offers a positive assessment of the volume.
SOURCE: A review of Is There a Text in This Class?, in Criticism, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 177-81.
Reproduced from enotes.
https://www.enotes.com/topics/stanley...
Is There a Text in This Class? is Stanley Fish’s critical autobiography, a collection of twelve essays published over the last decade (Chapters 1–12) and four previously unpublished lectures delivered at Kenyon College in 1979 (Chapters 13–16) held together by an introductory outline of the development of his thought and by prefatory notes at the head of each chapter which identify the circumstances of each essay’s composition, the shortcomings of its findings, and the position it occupies in the narrative of the formation of the viewpoint the book finally espouses. The hero of this chronicle is interpretation, and its villain is “ordinary language,” “a kind of language that ‘merely’ presents or mirrors facts independently of any consideration of value, interest, perspective, purpose, and so on” (p. 97). “Ordinary language” goes by many names, but it always makes the same claim: the world is objectively knowable, and language, at least at some level, transparently represents that world. “It is not too much to say,” Fish remarks, “that everything I write is written against that claim, in all of its consequences and implications” (p. 97). Those consequences and implications are manifold, and their rejection entails a wholesale revision of common conceptions of language, perception, subjectivity, understanding and argumentation which Fish deftly and successfully negotiates in these pages.
Fish argues that perception does not precede interpretation but only takes place through verbal and mental categories which are interpretive since they are conventional and contextual, grounded in the purposes, desires, values and interests of particular communities. To perceive objectively, he reasons, one would have to stand outside all contexts, to perceive from no point of view at all—an option unavailable to human beings. Fish is no solipsist, however. His point is not to deny the existence of the world, merely the existence of a neutral knowledge of it. He seeks to escape the subject/object trap by conceiving of (human) reality as the indissoluble conjunction of the world and conventional modes of organizing it. One produces facts rather than receiving them, but one usually produces them through assumptions so deeply held and so much a part of one’s situation that they seem to be attributes of reality. To some readers this must smack of the rankest subjectivism, and Fish confesses that he too feared that the abandonment of objective standards of knowledge would authorize interpretive anarchy until he realized that objectivity and subjectivity are two sides of the same coin, both embedded in an epistemology that separates subject and object. If objectivity presupposes perception unconstrained by situation and conventional mental categories, subjectivity presupposes interpretation likewise unconstrained, that is, interpretation which an individual freely and acontextually imposes at will. But an individual can no more choose an arbitrary interpretation than he can discover an absolute truth, for both he and the world are structured by the cognitive categories he learns and utilizes in his particular situation. The subject is not autonomous; he possess and is possessed by received notions which construct the world. The apparent stability of reality, which common sense insists is not illusory, proceeds not from an inherent configuration of the world but from the institutions which communities inaugurate and which constitute communities. Within the shared norms, values and interests of a community, individuals may dispute issues, propose arguments and reach conclusions which then may be subjected to verification procedures since they construct the world with, and they are constructed by, the same assumptions inherent in their situation. In other words, they may engage in meaningful debate because they share the same mechanisms for producing the facts under discussion and the same procedures for evaluating them. Thus a certain objectivity prevails within a community, but it is not universal or eternal; instead, it is contextual, and hence subject to change. And since individuals are always members of communities, they are never without standards of judgment. To paraphrase Fish, objectivity always exists, but it is not always the same one.
The consequences of this position for literary criticism are far-reaching. The text can no longer be considered an independent entity which authorizes certain interpretations, but must be seen as the product of an act of reading, as an entity constructed by institutional norms and cognitive categories. Arguments about the meaning of poems, then, are disputes not over interpretations of the verifiable facts of a poem (unless both parties have agreed to the same facts—that is, agreed to produce them in the same way), but over ways of making poems. The resolution of such arguments advances by persuasion rather than demonstration, by one party adopting the other’s perspective rather than both parties submitting to the arbitration of factual evidence. To convince another of one’s interpretation, one first identifies a common ground of assumptions shared with one’s adversary and then argues for the rationality of further assumptions with which one’s opponent differs in hopes that he will be persuaded to adopt them. Such a procedure is possible because one always shares some assumptions with members of one’s community (including assumptions as to what will count as a reasonable argument) and because all conventions, although subject to change, do not change at the same time. Since interpretive disputes are disputes about the perspectives for construing reality, and since group values and interests are inherent in any perspective, all critical arguments are political. Criticism thus surrenders its claims to disinterested objectivity, but it also regains its vitality as a formative social force.
Besides promoting this general theory of criticism, Fish also performs extensive and rigorous critiques of the assumptions of other theorists. He finds invalid, for instance, the stylisticians’ claim to generate interpretations of literary works from objective descriptions of the works’ formal features, not simply because the correlation they make between formal descriptions and interpretations is arbitrary, but also because the formal patterns which they “objectively” isolate are themselves products of interpretation which contain the conclusions that the analysis supposedly generates. Fish also claims that theorists who define literature as a deviation from ordinary language are misguided because they fail to see that literary language is not a stable entity but an open category which is filled by whatever features a particular community deems to be literary. By erecting an opposition between an objective, serious language and a non-serious, but value-laden literary language, they denigrate both the norm and its deviation, for ordinary language in this model is inhuman (because void of value) and literary language is trivial (because unserious). Only by admitting that all language is interested and purposive and that ordinary language is merely one special type of language can literary and non-literary language be restored their proper integrity. Speech-act theorists who seek a formal distinction between fictional and non-fictional discourse likewise err, for they do not recognize that such a distinction is contextual and hence unformalizable. They are similarly mistaken when they claim an objective, absolute difference between direct speech acts, in which sentences have a primary, literal meaning, and indirect speech acts, in which sentences have a secondary, figurative meaning, for the literal meaning of a direct speech act inheres not in the sentence itself, as the speech-act theorists claim, but in the context in which it is customarily delivered and apprehended.
These are but a few of the critical positions Fish dissects in this book, and no bare summary of his conclusions can do justice to the brilliance of his analyses. Rather than pursue further a synopsis of Fish’s critical battles, I would like to indicate two areas which he could possibly have explored more fully. Late in the book Fish raises the issue of “what the poststructuralists would term ‘the status of my own discourse’” (p. 368), admits that his theory proceeds by way of limited, contextual assumptions, and then dismisses the issue as trivial since the same is true of all other theories. But the questions at stake—the value of metacriticism and the possibility of self-knowledge—deserve a more complete response. If one can objectively determine the rules of baseball, can one similarly determine the rules which constitute social institutions of a less openly artificial nature? Can knowledge of an institution arise from within, or must it be grounded in another contextual frame? Is there a hierarchy of contexts which permits a metacritical stance or merely many competing perspectives which, when conjoined, illuminate one another? If one’s community interprets reality in such a way as to oppress other communities, how can one identify one’s oppressive assumptions and change them? Fish argues that a change in one’s views always comes from without, but cannot change also come from within? I also wish that Fish had indicated more fully his relationship to other theorists who express similar views. Would he find congenial the epistemological assumptions of Gregory Bateson’s and Anthony Wilden’s ecosystemic conception of mind? How would he appraise the semiotics of Umberto Eco, who defines the referent of any semiotic system as a cultural unit of signification, yet attempts a formal description of such systems? How would he evaluate the claims of deconstructionists to dismantle texts from within by exposing the complicity of meaning-enabling antitheses? Would he assent to a Kuhnian or a Foucaultian view of history?
Of course one cannot do everything in a single book; thus these questions should not be construed as complaints but as requests for answers in Fish’s future. Is There a Text in This Class? is a substantial achievement which deserves the serious consideration of all students of literature. Its arguments are cogent, forceful and engaging, its style is witty, personable and unpretentious, and its analyses are just, incisive and economical. Most important, the theory it advocates is provocative, comprehensive and, I believe, true.
My pulls from the book:
+ ...Communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of assumptions, of practices understood to be relevant in relation to purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the assumption of these purposes and goals that any utterance is immediately heard. (318)
+ The point is that there is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground. (319-320)
+ ...[A]cts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities. (326)
+ ...Skilled reading is usually thought to be a matter of discerning what is there, but if the example of my students can be generalized, it is a matter of knowing how to produce what can thereafter be said to be there. Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decide poems: they make them. (327)
+ ...[T]he source of our interpretive unanimity was a structure of interests and understood goals, a structure whose categories so filled out individual consciousness that they were rendered as one....(335)
+ An awareness that one's perspective is limited does not make the facts yielded by that perspective seem any less real; and when that perspective has given way to another, a new set of facts will occupy the position of the real ones.(360)
+ ...The project of radical doubt can never outrun the necessity of being situated; in order to doubt everything, including the ground one stands on, one must stand somewhere else, and that somewhere else will then be the ground on which one stands. This infinite regress could be halted only if one could stand free of any ground whatsoever, if the mind could divest itself of all prejudices and presuppositions and start, in the Cartesian manner, from scratch; but then of course you would have nothing to start with and anything with which you did start (even "I think, therefore I am") would be a prejudice or a supposition. To put the matter in a slightly different way: radical skepticism is a possibility only if the mind exists independently of its furnishing, of the categories of understanding that inform it; but if, as I have been arguing, the mind is constituted by those categories, there is no possibility of achieving the distance from them that would make them available to a skeptical inquiry. In short, one cannot, properly speaking, be a skeptic, and one cannot be a skeptic for the same reason that one cannot be a relativist, because one cannot achieve the distance from his own beliefs and assumptions that would result in their being no more authoritative for him than the beliefs and assumptions he himself used to hold. The conclusion is tautological but inescapable: one believes what one believes, and does so without reservation. The reservation inherent in the general position I have been arguing--that one's beliefs and therefore one's assumptions are subject to change--has no real force, since until a change occurs the interpretation that seems self-evident to me will continue to seem so, no matter how many previous changes I can recall.(360-1)
+ It is always possible to entertain beliefs and opinions other than one's own; but that is precisely how they will be seen, as beliefs and opinions other than one's own; and therefore as beliefs and opinions that are false, or mistaken, or partial, or immature, or absurd.(361)
Here's the text of a review that I found both helpful and accurate. Like its author, I also count myself a member of Fish's school. Its penultimate paragraph reads:
"'Is There a Text in This Class?' is a substantial achievement which deserves the serious consideration of all students of literature. Its arguments are cogent, forceful and engaging, its style is witty, personable and unpretentious, and its analyses are just, incisive and economical. Most important, the theory it advocates is provocative, comprehensive and, I believe, true."
And then the rest of the review:
Is There a Text in This Class?
by Paul Strohm
In the following review of Is There a Text in This Class?, Strohm provides a summary of Fish's critical arguments and offers a positive assessment of the volume.
SOURCE: A review of Is There a Text in This Class?, in Criticism, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 177-81.
Reproduced from enotes.
https://www.enotes.com/topics/stanley...
Is There a Text in This Class? is Stanley Fish’s critical autobiography, a collection of twelve essays published over the last decade (Chapters 1–12) and four previously unpublished lectures delivered at Kenyon College in 1979 (Chapters 13–16) held together by an introductory outline of the development of his thought and by prefatory notes at the head of each chapter which identify the circumstances of each essay’s composition, the shortcomings of its findings, and the position it occupies in the narrative of the formation of the viewpoint the book finally espouses. The hero of this chronicle is interpretation, and its villain is “ordinary language,” “a kind of language that ‘merely’ presents or mirrors facts independently of any consideration of value, interest, perspective, purpose, and so on” (p. 97). “Ordinary language” goes by many names, but it always makes the same claim: the world is objectively knowable, and language, at least at some level, transparently represents that world. “It is not too much to say,” Fish remarks, “that everything I write is written against that claim, in all of its consequences and implications” (p. 97). Those consequences and implications are manifold, and their rejection entails a wholesale revision of common conceptions of language, perception, subjectivity, understanding and argumentation which Fish deftly and successfully negotiates in these pages.
Fish argues that perception does not precede interpretation but only takes place through verbal and mental categories which are interpretive since they are conventional and contextual, grounded in the purposes, desires, values and interests of particular communities. To perceive objectively, he reasons, one would have to stand outside all contexts, to perceive from no point of view at all—an option unavailable to human beings. Fish is no solipsist, however. His point is not to deny the existence of the world, merely the existence of a neutral knowledge of it. He seeks to escape the subject/object trap by conceiving of (human) reality as the indissoluble conjunction of the world and conventional modes of organizing it. One produces facts rather than receiving them, but one usually produces them through assumptions so deeply held and so much a part of one’s situation that they seem to be attributes of reality. To some readers this must smack of the rankest subjectivism, and Fish confesses that he too feared that the abandonment of objective standards of knowledge would authorize interpretive anarchy until he realized that objectivity and subjectivity are two sides of the same coin, both embedded in an epistemology that separates subject and object. If objectivity presupposes perception unconstrained by situation and conventional mental categories, subjectivity presupposes interpretation likewise unconstrained, that is, interpretation which an individual freely and acontextually imposes at will. But an individual can no more choose an arbitrary interpretation than he can discover an absolute truth, for both he and the world are structured by the cognitive categories he learns and utilizes in his particular situation. The subject is not autonomous; he possess and is possessed by received notions which construct the world. The apparent stability of reality, which common sense insists is not illusory, proceeds not from an inherent configuration of the world but from the institutions which communities inaugurate and which constitute communities. Within the shared norms, values and interests of a community, individuals may dispute issues, propose arguments and reach conclusions which then may be subjected to verification procedures since they construct the world with, and they are constructed by, the same assumptions inherent in their situation. In other words, they may engage in meaningful debate because they share the same mechanisms for producing the facts under discussion and the same procedures for evaluating them. Thus a certain objectivity prevails within a community, but it is not universal or eternal; instead, it is contextual, and hence subject to change. And since individuals are always members of communities, they are never without standards of judgment. To paraphrase Fish, objectivity always exists, but it is not always the same one.
The consequences of this position for literary criticism are far-reaching. The text can no longer be considered an independent entity which authorizes certain interpretations, but must be seen as the product of an act of reading, as an entity constructed by institutional norms and cognitive categories. Arguments about the meaning of poems, then, are disputes not over interpretations of the verifiable facts of a poem (unless both parties have agreed to the same facts—that is, agreed to produce them in the same way), but over ways of making poems. The resolution of such arguments advances by persuasion rather than demonstration, by one party adopting the other’s perspective rather than both parties submitting to the arbitration of factual evidence. To convince another of one’s interpretation, one first identifies a common ground of assumptions shared with one’s adversary and then argues for the rationality of further assumptions with which one’s opponent differs in hopes that he will be persuaded to adopt them. Such a procedure is possible because one always shares some assumptions with members of one’s community (including assumptions as to what will count as a reasonable argument) and because all conventions, although subject to change, do not change at the same time. Since interpretive disputes are disputes about the perspectives for construing reality, and since group values and interests are inherent in any perspective, all critical arguments are political. Criticism thus surrenders its claims to disinterested objectivity, but it also regains its vitality as a formative social force.
Besides promoting this general theory of criticism, Fish also performs extensive and rigorous critiques of the assumptions of other theorists. He finds invalid, for instance, the stylisticians’ claim to generate interpretations of literary works from objective descriptions of the works’ formal features, not simply because the correlation they make between formal descriptions and interpretations is arbitrary, but also because the formal patterns which they “objectively” isolate are themselves products of interpretation which contain the conclusions that the analysis supposedly generates. Fish also claims that theorists who define literature as a deviation from ordinary language are misguided because they fail to see that literary language is not a stable entity but an open category which is filled by whatever features a particular community deems to be literary. By erecting an opposition between an objective, serious language and a non-serious, but value-laden literary language, they denigrate both the norm and its deviation, for ordinary language in this model is inhuman (because void of value) and literary language is trivial (because unserious). Only by admitting that all language is interested and purposive and that ordinary language is merely one special type of language can literary and non-literary language be restored their proper integrity. Speech-act theorists who seek a formal distinction between fictional and non-fictional discourse likewise err, for they do not recognize that such a distinction is contextual and hence unformalizable. They are similarly mistaken when they claim an objective, absolute difference between direct speech acts, in which sentences have a primary, literal meaning, and indirect speech acts, in which sentences have a secondary, figurative meaning, for the literal meaning of a direct speech act inheres not in the sentence itself, as the speech-act theorists claim, but in the context in which it is customarily delivered and apprehended.
These are but a few of the critical positions Fish dissects in this book, and no bare summary of his conclusions can do justice to the brilliance of his analyses. Rather than pursue further a synopsis of Fish’s critical battles, I would like to indicate two areas which he could possibly have explored more fully. Late in the book Fish raises the issue of “what the poststructuralists would term ‘the status of my own discourse’” (p. 368), admits that his theory proceeds by way of limited, contextual assumptions, and then dismisses the issue as trivial since the same is true of all other theories. But the questions at stake—the value of metacriticism and the possibility of self-knowledge—deserve a more complete response. If one can objectively determine the rules of baseball, can one similarly determine the rules which constitute social institutions of a less openly artificial nature? Can knowledge of an institution arise from within, or must it be grounded in another contextual frame? Is there a hierarchy of contexts which permits a metacritical stance or merely many competing perspectives which, when conjoined, illuminate one another? If one’s community interprets reality in such a way as to oppress other communities, how can one identify one’s oppressive assumptions and change them? Fish argues that a change in one’s views always comes from without, but cannot change also come from within? I also wish that Fish had indicated more fully his relationship to other theorists who express similar views. Would he find congenial the epistemological assumptions of Gregory Bateson’s and Anthony Wilden’s ecosystemic conception of mind? How would he appraise the semiotics of Umberto Eco, who defines the referent of any semiotic system as a cultural unit of signification, yet attempts a formal description of such systems? How would he evaluate the claims of deconstructionists to dismantle texts from within by exposing the complicity of meaning-enabling antitheses? Would he assent to a Kuhnian or a Foucaultian view of history?
Of course one cannot do everything in a single book; thus these questions should not be construed as complaints but as requests for answers in Fish’s future. Is There a Text in This Class? is a substantial achievement which deserves the serious consideration of all students of literature. Its arguments are cogent, forceful and engaging, its style is witty, personable and unpretentious, and its analyses are just, incisive and economical. Most important, the theory it advocates is provocative, comprehensive and, I believe, true.
My pulls from the book:
+ ...Communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of assumptions, of practices understood to be relevant in relation to purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the assumption of these purposes and goals that any utterance is immediately heard. (318)
+ The point is that there is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground. (319-320)
+ ...[A]cts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities. (326)
+ ...Skilled reading is usually thought to be a matter of discerning what is there, but if the example of my students can be generalized, it is a matter of knowing how to produce what can thereafter be said to be there. Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decide poems: they make them. (327)
+ ...[T]he source of our interpretive unanimity was a structure of interests and understood goals, a structure whose categories so filled out individual consciousness that they were rendered as one....(335)
+ An awareness that one's perspective is limited does not make the facts yielded by that perspective seem any less real; and when that perspective has given way to another, a new set of facts will occupy the position of the real ones.(360)
+ ...The project of radical doubt can never outrun the necessity of being situated; in order to doubt everything, including the ground one stands on, one must stand somewhere else, and that somewhere else will then be the ground on which one stands. This infinite regress could be halted only if one could stand free of any ground whatsoever, if the mind could divest itself of all prejudices and presuppositions and start, in the Cartesian manner, from scratch; but then of course you would have nothing to start with and anything with which you did start (even "I think, therefore I am") would be a prejudice or a supposition. To put the matter in a slightly different way: radical skepticism is a possibility only if the mind exists independently of its furnishing, of the categories of understanding that inform it; but if, as I have been arguing, the mind is constituted by those categories, there is no possibility of achieving the distance from them that would make them available to a skeptical inquiry. In short, one cannot, properly speaking, be a skeptic, and one cannot be a skeptic for the same reason that one cannot be a relativist, because one cannot achieve the distance from his own beliefs and assumptions that would result in their being no more authoritative for him than the beliefs and assumptions he himself used to hold. The conclusion is tautological but inescapable: one believes what one believes, and does so without reservation. The reservation inherent in the general position I have been arguing--that one's beliefs and therefore one's assumptions are subject to change--has no real force, since until a change occurs the interpretation that seems self-evident to me will continue to seem so, no matter how many previous changes I can recall.(360-1)
+ It is always possible to entertain beliefs and opinions other than one's own; but that is precisely how they will be seen, as beliefs and opinions other than one's own; and therefore as beliefs and opinions that are false, or mistaken, or partial, or immature, or absurd.(361)
July 23, 2016
In lieu of a review, here are a few suggested alternative titles for Mr. Fish:
"Literature in the Reader" -> "Let Me Put My Reader in You"
"What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?" -> "This Is Stylistics, Now Let Me Say A Bunch of Terrible Things about It"
"Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" -> "I Don't Need to Be Right, Only Interesting: Or, the Fish-Trump Theorem"
"Interpreting the Variorum" -> "I'm A Dog Chasing Its Tail, But So Are You All So It's All the Same, Except It Isn't Cause I Can Chase My Tail Better"
"How to Do Things with Austin and Searle" -> "I've Also Read Strawson and Wittgenstein!"
"Literature in the Reader" -> "Let Me Put My Reader in You"
"What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?" -> "This Is Stylistics, Now Let Me Say A Bunch of Terrible Things about It"
"Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" -> "I Don't Need to Be Right, Only Interesting: Or, the Fish-Trump Theorem"
"Interpreting the Variorum" -> "I'm A Dog Chasing Its Tail, But So Are You All So It's All the Same, Except It Isn't Cause I Can Chase My Tail Better"
"How to Do Things with Austin and Searle" -> "I've Also Read Strawson and Wittgenstein!"
February 6, 2026
In Chapter 13, Is There a Text in This Class? Fish establishes that textual meaning derives from the context and the relationships it conveys. There is no definite reading of a text, but the institutional structures that configure the text for encoding and decoding in a certain format. This is taken as natural, unnoticed by the communicators who are embedded within the system.
The example chosen is rather interesting. While the student’s question of “Is there a Text in This Class?” is eventually understood by her professor, a subsequent dialogue with professors outside of the discipline showed that they were unable to decipher it. This points to the idea that contextual knowledge or prior consensus needs to be established for successful communication. However, it may also be read as a gradual inaccessibility of the discipline, where the academic jargon and theories present a division between those located within and outside of the discipline. It is not to say that the knowledge and consensus cannot be established for successful communication, but it may require a longer process.
The example chosen is rather interesting. While the student’s question of “Is there a Text in This Class?” is eventually understood by her professor, a subsequent dialogue with professors outside of the discipline showed that they were unable to decipher it. This points to the idea that contextual knowledge or prior consensus needs to be established for successful communication. However, it may also be read as a gradual inaccessibility of the discipline, where the academic jargon and theories present a division between those located within and outside of the discipline. It is not to say that the knowledge and consensus cannot be established for successful communication, but it may require a longer process.
July 19, 2018
Although Fish’s work on interpretative communities and deconstruction is incredibly fascinating, much of the rest of the scholarship in this book has not aged nearly as well. The conversations Fish engages in seem like less of an ongoing conversation amongst scholars of literature anymore, although for anyone who is interested in culture’s ties to interpretation of truth and meaning making, there are some fantastic ideas waiting to be explored here.
Read
October 13, 2023i admittedly did skim read (or just skip) several of the chapters in this so maybe i'm cheating by marking it as 'read' on here but whatever... but the chapters i did read were fascinating and v enjoyable!! i'd been looking forward to this book bc i'd read so much about it, and it did meet the expectations i'd built up for it
January 4, 2024
Fish behaves exactly how you expect him to! He creates mazes of discourses and gives you trails of breadcrumbs to reach a point of agreement. So far, I am not complaining.
February 20, 2025
Promesse non mantenute: dov’è l’insegnamento?
March 24, 2025
Seminal. Just taking a guess as to when I read it.
April 20, 2013
I started college as an English major in 2004, about twenty-four years after the publication of this book and about thirty years after the publication of the first essay in the book. By then, Fish's thesis had already been argued, accepted, and worked into the institution's views of literary criticism. I wasn't taught reader-response theory until I took a literary criticism class, but I didn't need to be taught it. It's just part of the way we do things in English classes now; no longer do professors teach that the reader's thoughts and opinions don't matter, that the text is 100% stable and containing meaning that must be extracted from it. That being said, I still found Fish's presentation and defense of his thesis freeing. Reading about the disputes in the literary community and feeling as if Fish won something somehow because of the way things are done now imparted a sense of "ahhhh" to what Fish wrote in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
What I didn't like about the book is that Fish's arguments become repetitive after a little while. He restates his ideas and the main supports of his thesis in almost every essay.
However, what I liked about the book is the organization, the way the ideas move forward as the reader turns the pages. I really enjoyed Fish's analysis of literary texts, actually seeing his theory put into practice. The first part of the book was more theoretical and less anecdotal, so it was a little more difficult to process, but it was worth it to understand how the reader response theory functions on a practical level. I also just enjoyed Fish's voice, his humor, and the way in which he clearly presents his ideas. I had to read a couple of the essays for a lit crit class, and I never forgot about them and how "easy" they were to understand compared to some of the other theorists and critics we had to read. It took me almost ten years to read the entire book, but I'm glad that I did.
What I didn't like about the book is that Fish's arguments become repetitive after a little while. He restates his ideas and the main supports of his thesis in almost every essay.
However, what I liked about the book is the organization, the way the ideas move forward as the reader turns the pages. I really enjoyed Fish's analysis of literary texts, actually seeing his theory put into practice. The first part of the book was more theoretical and less anecdotal, so it was a little more difficult to process, but it was worth it to understand how the reader response theory functions on a practical level. I also just enjoyed Fish's voice, his humor, and the way in which he clearly presents his ideas. I had to read a couple of the essays for a lit crit class, and I never forgot about them and how "easy" they were to understand compared to some of the other theorists and critics we had to read. It took me almost ten years to read the entire book, but I'm glad that I did.
November 14, 2010
Molto in breve: il significato di un testo non sta nel testo stesso ma è il frutto dell’interpretazione di esso; questa attività, però, non genera caos, relativismo ecc. perché l’interprete non è un fungo e appartiene necessariamente a una comunità che condivide in generale una serie di valori (visione del mondo?) e nello specifico un set di strategie di lettura (costruzione) dei testi. Ecco quindi che certe ipotesi di lettura, all’interno di una certa comunità di lettori, in un certo tempo, saranno giudicate ridicole mentre altre saranno prese in considerazione; ci sarà sempre un margine di intesa e uno spazio per la comunicazione – avrà quindi senso continuare a leggere, interpretare, insegnare, studiare, discutere ecc. perché non verrà mai a mancare il sentimento di un continuo avanzamento del sapere.
March 13, 2013
This book comprises Fish's journey from a reader-response theory of meaning, if one is inclined to call grammatical statements about meaning 'theories,' to the interpretive community turn. Fish offers reflections, before every essay, as to what he was hoping to achieve within the essays and whether he thought he had achieved his goal--and whether or not such a goal was worth achieving. I found this book extremely lucid and Fish's arguments convincing. Although I do not agree with him completely, I do think Fish's ideas--especially his later works--are worth looking at, especially if one is interested in the concept of meaning. Not only does he astutely deal with anticipated objections, but he also tries to comfort the reader who comes from a foundationalist background--especially about the prospect of relativism.
August 3, 2014
Twenty-three years after I read the first chunk in a graduate seminar, I've now read the whole thing. KABOOM! Graceful, witty, and arrogant writing on epistemology as manifested in the context of literary criticism. The only book of theory I can recall with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.
To anyone having trouble with it: it gets easier, and better, as you go. If you are bogging down in the early going, just skip ahead a chapter and start fresh.
To anyone having trouble with it: it gets easier, and better, as you go. If you are bogging down in the early going, just skip ahead a chapter and start fresh.
March 1, 2015
كتاب لا أعلم لماذا تمّت ترجمته الى العربية؟ الكتاب يتحدث عن النقد الأدبي لنصوص من اللغة الانجليزية من كل جوانب هذه اللغة، عند ترجمتها للغة العربية يفقد الكتاب معناه لأن الكاتب ينتقد بعض النصوص المكتوبة وطريقة ترتيب الكلمات لغويًا بلغته الأم، الكتاب لايستحق القراءة
July 1, 2009
This is a very enjoyable read. I'd recommend it to anyone who is just starting to examine the problem of language.
April 27, 2020
"How to Recognize a Poem When You See One"
June 28, 2024
This book is literally worldview shifting in its implications and is the best text I’ve read yet on interpretation.
July 28, 2015
kinda the kid's table of a much more rigorous reception theory that one finds in Iser and Jauss.
Want to read
September 9, 2017Wikipedia entry on interpretive communities.
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