Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature

by Stanley Fish

The foremost theoretical statement and practical criticism of seventeenth century texts from the standpoint of reader response

Genres: Criticism, History, Literary Criticism, Renaissance, Nonfiction

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Stanley 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.

Reviews

[Jesse]

What I find compelling about Fish's readings of Renaissance and early modern literature is that even when I don't agree with the particular conclusions he arrives at they nonetheless almost always remain provocative and compelling. While Reader-Response criticism can easily (and often has) devolved into a kind of hazy solipsism, Fish's analysis remains relentlessly sharp and reveals what the theory, when properly used, should accomplish: an extremely close and attentive reading to the nuances of a text and how it functions as a textual artifact as the reader experiences it during the reading process.

[James Geary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, subtle analysis of 17th-century poetry that has fascinating implications and applications for modernist and post-modernist literature. Stanley Fish is also the author of the entertaining and instructive How To Write A Sentence and How To Read One.