Stanley Fish
Encyclopedia
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 12 books. Fish has also taught at the Cardozo School of Law, University of California, Berkeley
, Johns Hopkins University
, Columbia University
, and Duke University
.
from the University of Pennsylvania
in 1959, and an M.A.
from Yale University
in 1960. He completed his Ph.D.
in 1962, also at Yale University
. 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
, as well as serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor at The John Marshall Law School
from 2000 until 2002. He also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice, and was the chairman of the Religious Studies Committee. During his tenure there, he recruited professors well respected in the academic community and garnered a lot of attention for the College. After resigning as dean in a high-level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC, 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. In June 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. In November 2010 he joined the Board of Visitors of Ralston College
, a start-up institution in Savannah, Georgia. He has also been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science since 1985 .
. His first book, published by Yale University Press in 1965, was on the late-medieval/early-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, Constantinos 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.
— 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.
of the university
, having taken positions supporting campus speech codes and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise.
Fish argued in January 2008 on his New York Times-syndicated blog that the humanities
are of no instrumental value
, but have only intrinsic worth
. Fish explains, "To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said diminishes the object of its supposed praise."
Fish has lectured across the country at many universities and colleges including Florida Atlantic University
, Brown University
, the University of Pennsylvania
, Harvard University
, University of Toronto
, Columbia University
, the University of Vermont
, the University of Georgia
, the University of Louisville
, the University of Kentucky
, Bates College
,the University of Central Florida
, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
.
Within the first years following Fish's departure as chair, many of his most prominent hires left, including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(citing anti-intellectualism and homophobia), Michael Moon
, and Jonathan Goldberg
. By 1999, Fish's wife, Americanist Jane Tompkins, had "practically quit teaching" at Duke and "worked as a cook at a local health food restaurant."
Writing in Slate Magazine
, Judith Shulevitz
reported that not only does Fish openly proclaim himself "unprincipled" but also rejects wholesale the concepts of "fairness, impartiality, reasonableness." To Fish, "ideas have no consequences." For taking this stance, Shulevitz characterizes Fish as "not the unprincipled relativist he's accused of being. He's something worse. He's a fatalist."
Likewise, among academics, Fish has endured vigorous criticism. The conservative R. V. Young
writes,
Terry Eagleton
, a prominent British critic, excoriates Fish's "discreditable epistemology" as "sinister." According to Eagleton, "Like almost all diatribes against universalism
, Fish's critique of universalism has its own rigid universals: the priority at all times and places of sectoral interests, the permanence of conflict, the a priori status of belief systems, the rhetorical character of truth, the fact that all apparent openness is secretly closure, and the like." Hence, it is inherently self-defeating. Of Fish's attempt to co-opt the critiques leveled against him, Eagleton responds, "The felicitous upshot is that nobody can ever criticise Fish, since if their criticisms are intelligible to him, they belong to his cultural game and are thus not really criticisms at all; and if they are not intelligible, they belong to some other set of conventions entirely and are therefore irrelevant."
In her essay "Sophistry about Conventions," philosopher 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
and public intellectual, denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogeneous 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, Hirsch sees Fish as left to "wander in his own Elysian fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
literary theorist
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island
Providence, Rhode Island
Providence is the capital and most populous city of Rhode Island and was one of the first cities established in the United States. Located in Providence County, it is the third largest city in the New England region...
. He is often associated with postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
, at times to his irritation, as he describes himself as an anti-foundationalist
Anti-foundationalism
Anti-foundationalism as the name implies, is a term applied to any philosophy which rejects a foundationalist approach, i.e. an anti-foundationalist is one who does not believe that there is some fundamental belief or principle which is the basic ground or foundation of inquiry and knowledge...
.
He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University
Florida International University
Florida International University is an American public research university in metropolitan Miami, Florida, in the United States, with its main campus in University Park...
, in Miami, as well as Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Illinois at Chicago
The University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC, is a state-funded public research university located in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, near the Chicago Loop...
, and the author of 12 books. Fish has also taught at the Cardozo School of Law, University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
, Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, and Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
.
Academic career
Fish earned a B.A.Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
from the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
in 1959, and an M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
in 1960. He completed his Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in 1962, also at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. He taught English at the University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
and Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
before becoming Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
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
University of Illinois at Chicago
The University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC, is a state-funded public research university located in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, near the Chicago Loop...
, as well as serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor at The John Marshall Law School
John Marshall Law School
John Marshall Law School may refer to:*John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Illinois*John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, Georgia*Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in Cleveland, Ohio...
from 2000 until 2002. He also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice, and was the chairman of the Religious Studies Committee. During his tenure there, he recruited professors well respected in the academic community and garnered a lot of attention for the College. After resigning as dean in a high-level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC, 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. In June 2005, he accepted the position of Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University
Florida International University
Florida International University is an American public research university in metropolitan Miami, Florida, in the United States, with its main campus in University Park...
, teaching in the FIU College of Law. In November 2010 he joined the Board of Visitors of Ralston College
Ralston College
Ralston College is a liberal arts college in Savannah, Georgia, United States. It was founded on February 1, 2010 and as of December 2010 is not yet accepting applications for admission. The patrons of Ralston College are Harold Bloom, Hilary Putnam, and Salman Rushdie. The members of the Board...
, a start-up institution in Savannah, Georgia. He has also been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science since 1985 .
Milton
Fish started his career as a medievalistMedieval studies
-Development:The term 'medieval studies' began to be adopted by academics in the opening decades of the twentieth century, initially in the titles of books like G. G. Coulton's Ten Medieval Studies , to emphasize a greater interdisciplinary approach to a historical subject...
. His first book, published by Yale University Press in 1965, was on the late-medieval/early-Renaissance poet John Skelton
John Skelton
John Skelton, also known as John Shelton , possibly born in Diss, Norfolk, was an English poet.-Education:...
. Fish reveals in his partly biographical essay, "Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
, 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, Constantinos 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 prominent and respected literary theorist, Fish is best known for his analysis of interpretive communitiesInterpretive communities
Interpretive communities are a theoretical concept stemming from reader-response criticism and invented by Stanley Fish. They appeared in an article by Fish in 1976 entitled "Interpreting the Variorum". Fish's theory states that a text does not have meaning outside of a set of cultural assumptions...
— an offshoot of reader-response criticism
Reader-response criticism
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.Although literary theory has long paid some...
. Fish's work in this field examines how the interpretation of a text
Text (literary theory)
A text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented...
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.
Fish and university politics
In addition to his work in literary criticism, Fish has also written extensively on the politicsPolitics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
of the university
University
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
, having taken positions supporting campus speech codes and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise.
Fish argued in January 2008 on his New York Times-syndicated blog that the humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
are of no instrumental value
Instrumental value
Instrumental value is the value of objects, both physical objects and abstract objects, not as ends-in-themselves but a means of achieving something else...
, but have only intrinsic worth
Intrinsic value
Intrinsic value can refer to:*Intrinsic value , of an option or stock.*Intrinsic value , of a coin.*Intrinsic value , in ethics and philosophy.*Intrinsic value , in philosophy....
. Fish explains, "To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said diminishes the object of its supposed praise."
Fish has lectured across the country at many universities and colleges including Florida Atlantic University
Florida Atlantic University
Florida Atlantic University, also referred to as FAU or Florida Atlantic, is a public, coeducational, research university located in , United States. The university has six satellite campuses located in the Florida cities of Dania Beach, Davie, Fort Lauderdale, Jupiter, Port St. Lucie, and in Fort...
, Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
, Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, the University of Vermont
University of Vermont
The University of Vermont comprises seven undergraduate schools, an honors college, a graduate college, and a college of medicine. The Honors College does not offer its own degrees; students in the Honors College concurrently enroll in one of the university's seven undergraduate colleges or...
, the University of Georgia
University of Georgia
The University of Georgia is a public research university located in Athens, Georgia, United States. Founded in 1785, it is the oldest and largest of the state's institutions of higher learning and is one of multiple schools to claim the title of the oldest public university in the United States...
, the University of Louisville
University of Louisville
The University of Louisville is a public university in Louisville, Kentucky. When founded in 1798, it was the first city-owned public university in the United States and one of the first universities chartered west of the Allegheny Mountains. The university is mandated by the Kentucky General...
, the University of Kentucky
University of Kentucky
The University of Kentucky, also known as UK, is a public co-educational university and is one of the state's two land-grant universities, located in Lexington, Kentucky...
, Bates College
Bates College
Bates College is a highly selective, private liberal arts college located in Lewiston, Maine, in the United States. and was most recently ranked 21st in the nation in the 2011 US News Best Liberal Arts Colleges rankings. The college was founded in 1855 by abolitionists...
,the University of Central Florida
University of Central Florida
The University of Central Florida, commonly referred to as UCF, is a metropolitan public research university located in Orlando, Florida, United States...
, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
The Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law is the law school of Yeshiva University, located in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The school is named for Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo. Cardozo's success as a young school has been remarkable, leading some to characterize Cardozo as a...
.
Fish as university politician
As chair of the Duke English department from 1986 to 1992, Fish attracted attention and controversy. Fish, according to Lingua Franca, used "shameless—and in academe unheard-of—entrepreneurial gusto" to take "a respectable but staid Southern English department and transform it into the professional powerhouse of the day," in part through the payment of lavish salaries. His time at Duke saw comparatively quite light undergraduate and graduate coursework requirements, matched by heavy graduate teaching requirements. This permitted professors to reduce their own teaching. In April 1992, near the end of Fish's time as department chair, an external review committee considered evidence that the English curriculum had become "a hodgepodge of uncoordinated offerings," lacking in "broad foundational courses" or faculty planning. The department's dissipating prominence in the 1990s was featured on the front page of the New York Times.Within the first years following Fish's departure as chair, many of his most prominent hires left, including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory , and critical theory. Her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies...
(citing anti-intellectualism and homophobia), Michael Moon
Michael Moon
Michael Moon is an American literary academic. He received his Ph.D in 1989 from Johns Hopkins University for the thesis Whitman in revision : the politics of corporealilty and textuality in the first four editions of Leaves of grass He has been a professor in the English department at Johns...
, and Jonathan Goldberg
Jonathan Goldberg
Jonathan Goldberg is a literary theorist; formerly the Sir William Osler Professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University, he is currently Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at Emory University where he directs Studies in Sexualities...
. By 1999, Fish's wife, Americanist Jane Tompkins, had "practically quit teaching" at Duke and "worked as a cook at a local health food restaurant."
Criticisms of his work
As a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fish has been the target of wide-ranging criticism.Writing in Slate Magazine
Slate (magazine)
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
, Judith Shulevitz
Judith Shulevitz
Judith Shulevitz is an American journalist, editor and culture critic. She graduated from Yale College in 1986.From 1991 to 1994, Shulevitz was the co-editor of Lingua Franca with Margaret Talbot...
reported that not only does Fish openly proclaim himself "unprincipled" but also rejects wholesale the concepts of "fairness, impartiality, reasonableness." To Fish, "ideas have no consequences." For taking this stance, Shulevitz characterizes Fish as "not the unprincipled relativist he's accused of being. He's something worse. He's a fatalist."
Likewise, among academics, Fish has endured vigorous criticism. The conservative R. V. Young
R. V. Young
Robert V. Young, Jr. is a professor of Renaissance Literature and Literary Criticism in the English Department of North Carolina State University, co-founder and co-editor of the John Donne Journal, and author of multiple books and articles primarily related to the study of literature...
writes,
Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton
Terence Francis Eagleton FBA is a British literary theorist and critic, who is regarded as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics...
, a prominent British critic, excoriates Fish's "discreditable epistemology" as "sinister." According to Eagleton, "Like almost all diatribes against universalism
Universality (philosophy)
In philosophy, universalism is a doctrine or school claiming universal facts can be discovered and is therefore understood as being in opposition to relativism. In certain religions, universality is the quality ascribed to an entity whose existence is consistent throughout the universe...
, Fish's critique of universalism has its own rigid universals: the priority at all times and places of sectoral interests, the permanence of conflict, the a priori status of belief systems, the rhetorical character of truth, the fact that all apparent openness is secretly closure, and the like." Hence, it is inherently self-defeating. Of Fish's attempt to co-opt the critiques leveled against him, Eagleton responds, "The felicitous upshot is that nobody can ever criticise Fish, since if their criticisms are intelligible to him, they belong to his cultural game and are thus not really criticisms at all; and if they are not intelligible, they belong to some other set of conventions entirely and are therefore irrelevant."
In her essay "Sophistry about Conventions," philosopher Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum , is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics....
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
John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....
's work in A Theory of Justice
A Theory of Justice
A Theory of Justice is a book of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls. It was originally published in 1971 and revised in both 1975 and 1999. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to solve the problem of distributive justice by utilising a variant of the familiar device of the social...
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
Camille Paglia
Camille Anna Paglia , is an American author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984...
, author of Sexual Personae
Sexual Personae
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a groundbreaking and controversial survey of sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts written by scholar Camille Paglia.-Overview:...
and public intellectual, denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogeneous 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
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
, 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, Hirsch sees Fish as left to "wander in his own Elysian fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."
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 ArtifactsSelf-Consuming ArtifactsSelf-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature is book of literary criticism by American literary critic Stanley Fish. In it, Fish examines various English writers from the seventeenth century, including Sir Francis Bacon, George Herbert, John Bunyan, and John Milton...
: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1972. - "Interpreting the Variorum." Critical InquiryCritical InquiryCritical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press. It is considered a leading journal within literary studies, and particularly in the field of critical theory....
(1976). - "Why We Can't All Just Get Along." First ThingsFirst ThingsFirst Things is an ecumenical journal focused on creating a "religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society". The journal is inter-denominational and inter-religious, representing a broad intellectual tradition of Christian and Jewish critique of contemporary society...
(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.
- Save The World on Your Own Time Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism, and Law in a Classic TV Show. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
- How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011.
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 CourtSupreme Court of the United StatesThe Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
case of Hustler Magazine v. FalwellHustler Magazine v. FalwellIn Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 , the United States Supreme Court held, in a unanimous 8–0 decision , that the First Amendment's free-speech guarantee prohibits awarding damages to public figures to compensate for emotional distress intentionally inflicted upon them.Thus,...
) 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.
- Lang, Chris "The Reader-Response Theory of Stanley Fish"http://www.xenos.org/essays/litthry4.htm
- Landa, José Ángel García "Stanley E. Fish's Speech Acts"http://unizar.academia.edu/documents/0011/3625/Fish.pdf
External links
- Smart People Podcast interview with Stanley Fish
- 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 UniversityFlorida International UniversityFlorida International University is an American public research university in metropolitan Miami, Florida, in the United States, with its main campus in University Park...
. June 29, 2005. - Stanley Fish article published in the Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism.
- Stanley Fish. Florida International UniversityFlorida International UniversityFlorida International University is an American public research university in metropolitan Miami, Florida, in the United States, with its main campus in University Park...
Law School faculty biography. - Stanley Fish's blog at The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
Editorial section. - Stanley Fish on Deconstruction. Radio interview with program host, Hugh LaFollette. WETS-FM. University of San FranciscoUniversity of San FranciscoThe University of San Francisco , is a private, Jesuit/Catholic university located in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1855, USF was established as the first university in San Francisco. It is the second oldest institution for higher learning in California and the tenth-oldest university of...
. n.d. (Audio link.)