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Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies

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"Doing What Comes Naturally" is perhaps one of the best recent expressions of a certain type of American literature. That type can be found in the writings of such persons as Mencken and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Philosophically, the expression for it is "pragmatism," but what it really is is probably best expressed by a phrase written by Fish for another book. The book is called "Professional Correctness," and the phrase is "how stupid can you be?" That, in a line, pretty much sums up the thought of Fish's predecessors, and sums up the book Fish has written here. Fish's book is a fairly good one to read if one needs to have one's stupidities pointed out; a better source, however, of this sort of thing is still Mencken's "Chrestomathy." Nevertheless, Fish has the advantage over Mencken of being alive, and is thus in a better position to call our own most recent stupidities by name. So from that point of view Fish is worth reading.