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Stanley Eugene Fish

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Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities Paperback – June 25, 1982

by Stanley Fish (Author)

4.4 27 ratings

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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 often they agree with him, even when he and they may appear to be most dramatically at odds. Engaging, lucid, provocative, this book will immediately find its place among the seminal works of modern literary criticism.

Print length

394 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harvard University Press
Publication date

June 25, 1982
Dimensions

6 x 1.02 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0674467264
ISBN-13

978-0674467262
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“It is a great…pleasure these days to find a critic willing to discuss language, literature, reading, writing, and the community of readers on the understanding that the reader plays a real part in the production of his experience.”―Denis Donoghue, Times Literary Supplement

“No bare summary of his conclusions can do justice to the brilliance of his analyses… 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 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.”―Criticism

“These essays demonstrate why Fish has become the center―as both source and focus―of so much intellectual energy in contemporary American critical theory. For brilliance and forcefulness in argumentation and for sheer boldness of mind and spirit, he has no match.”―Barbara Herrnstein Smith

About the Author

Stanley Fish is Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University. His many books include There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press (June 25, 1982)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 394 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674467264
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674467262
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.02 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #898,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,268 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality
- #3,320 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #4,434 in Literary Movements & Periods

Customer Reviews:
4.4 27 ratings

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Stanley Eugene Fish

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Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University. He has previously taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has received many honors and awards, including being named the Chicagoan of the Year for Culture. He is the author of twelve books and is now a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He resides in Andes, New York; New York City; and Delray Beach, Florida; with his wife, Jane Tompkins.

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Yasmin

My Review about Stanley Fish's Book

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2012

Verified Purchase

This book is really interesting!
I recommend this book to all people who want to learn more about the Law and Literature movement!!

One person found this helpful

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Green Hornets Buddy

but it's good information nonetheless

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2015

Verified Purchase

Turns out I didn't need the book for a paper I'm writing, but it's good information nonetheless.

One person found this helpful

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William S Jamison

Interpretation is the only game in town

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2008

SF is a pragmatist and basically follows John Searle, J.L. Austin, and P.F. Strawson regarding philosophy of language. One aspect of this is to move away from an interpretive stance to the view that there is a clear effect of the reading of a passage on fluent speakers of the language and secondarily an interpretive effect dependent on each speakers (readers) point of view. (There is a nice Paul Ricoeur quote.) SF critiques relativism using it in the sense that is untenable. What makes an interpretation acceptable? "Interpretation is the only game in town." "There are no moves that are not moves in the game, and this includes even the move by which one claims no longer to be a player."

11 people found this helpful

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Friend

Is there a Fish in this text?

Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2010

I am amused to read reviews of this book which praise Fish's brilliance, sensitivity, nuanced critical abilities, etc., given that Fish does not believe in authorial intention and thinks the meaning of the text is co-created by the reader. Perhaps, though, these reviewers are praising their own genius, brilliance, etc. Or that is my reading of their texts ...

20 people found this helpful

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George Sala

Standing Before Sterling, Young Stanley Conceives His Calling

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2006

Rhetoric effaces who we
Were, and from these spires and courts,
Purges traces of our Jewy
Uncles in Bermuda shorts.

6 people found this helpful

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JPL

The book is only in fair condition.

Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2009

The price was great and delivery was fast enough, but the cover is bent and badly marked up, and there are handwritten notations in the text,

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Z. Norwood

problematic, but still worth reading

Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2006

The notion of "interpretive communities" has always seemed to me derivative of Kuhn's "disciplinary matrix," among other things (Iser's reception theory), though this isn't necessarily a fault. Fish brings much originality to bear on on the matter of interpretation, and despite major problems with his context-relative framework of meaning, his manner of writing and thinking saves it from general dismissal. Fish is insightful, lighthearted, and tempers his stronger claims with well-placed caveats. More problematic than Fish's theory, from my standpoint, is what has happened to the Academy under its sway. The theoretical assumptions common to Fish, Barthes, and Derrida have become overly institutionalized, forming a type of self-fulfilling 'interpretive community' of its own internal design, sealing itself off from criticisms. That this community has grown unnecessarily hostile to students appealing to scientific, classical, or analytic philosophical research to inform their theoretical backdrops demonstrates the point. Recent trends in the literary humanities, in my experience, has made it difficult for such students to break into the field (or what's left of it), even when they sympathize with the spirit behind reader-response criticism. I suppose, though, that if my views here are accurate, then they inadvertently support the main thrust of Fish's theory--namely, that what's wrong with the Academy--or what gives it life, depending on your perspective--is the never-ending "clash of interpretive communities." I would like to hope nevertheless that some common ground exists beneath the play of interpretive communities and texts so we can get back to the business of analyzing literature, inspiring students, sensitizing them to the philosophy of literature, etc., without feeling ideologically committed to a particular 'side.' Fish would likely respond to this hope of mine by saying, as he has recently, that "common ground is what emerges when you assume the normative status of your own judgment and fix the label 'unreasonable' or 'inhuman' or 'monstrous' to the judgment of your opponents." So it goes.

19 people found this helpful

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Martin Asiner

A Community Full of Fish

Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2013

ITTTC continues Fish's trend towards self-consuming. He admits that he has considerably altered his views toward reader-response. Now not only does he take back what he just wrote, he adds that his words have no practical use or relevance. His new paradigm is that there is no such thing as a text since the reader subsumed it into his own world-view. Second, there is also no such person as a reader either since the individual reader was now to be seen as a very small cog in a very big wheel called an "interpretive community." The reader is like a Borg drone from Star Trek; he exists physically but his mind is part of an all-encompassing Gestaltic hive mind. It is the act of interpretation by an interpretative community that creates any text. Without interpretation of a text to give that text meaning, there is no text just characters and symbols printed on paper. An unread and uninterpreted series of pages with words printed on them is not a text since it has no meaning. It is here that Fish runs into trouble with his interpretative community. He is vague about what it really is, how one may join, how one may leave, how one may qualify to join, how the individual drones smooth over their interpretive differences (if indeed they have any), why some interpretative communities may not agree with one another, and why it must even be necessary for one drone to persuade another if both have access to the same interpretive strategies. This concept of an interpretive community makes Fish seem like a relativist, but he asks his readers to take his word for it that he is not. His defense against relativism or solipsism is that the mere presence of a drone as one member of an interpretive community must mean that the community's sense of group think ensures an objectivity that would otherwise be lacking in a free agent. Hence, the ongoing stability of the community is a bulwark against encroaching relativism. Since the unread text has no meaning and the free agent drone is a potential relativist, it is to the interpretive community that establishes meaning. Fish does not address whether such a community might one day change its mind about anything nor does he consider how the other drones within that community establish with certainty the sources of agreement. One final problem: if an interpretive community thinks and acts like a single mind, then how does the collective differ from the individual? Why would then the opinion of the collective be objective and non-relativistic and the opinion of the individual subjective and relativistic? One potential clue to any and all the aforementioned lies in how Fish describes the well-read reader who presumably is a qualified candidate for admission. Such a candidate is not merely well-read; he must be intimately acquainted with a myriad of disciplines, must have supremely developed skills of perception and analysis, and must be a cogent and persuasive writer. In short, this candidate is Fish himself.

11 people found this helpful

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