Stanley Fish (born 1938) is a prominent American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He is among the most important critics of the English poet John Milton in the 20th century, and is often associated with post-modernism, at times to his irritation. He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a Professor of Law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Fish has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books. Fish describes himself as an anti-foundationalist. [1] Year 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. ... “Providence” redirects here. ... For other persons named John Milton, see John Milton (disambiguation). ... Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated pomo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. ... Florida International University, commonly known as FIU, is a public research university whose main campus is located in University Park in metropolitan Miami, Florida, in the United States. ... This article is about the city in Florida. ... This article is about the University of Illinois at Chicago. ... Sather tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... The Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, is a private institution of higher learning located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. ... Duke University is a private coeducational research university located in Durham, North Carolina, USA. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. ... Anti-foundationalism is a term applied to any philosophy which rejects a foundationalist approach; i. ...

Academic career

Fish did his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania [2] and earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1962. 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, where he was paid $230,000 a year, more than the Governor of Illinois.[3] He also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice, and was Chair of the Religious Studies Committee [4]. During his tenure there, he recruited "big name" professors and garnered a lot of attention for the College [5]. After resigning as dean in a high level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC [6], 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 [7]. In June of 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. This article is about the private Ivy League university in Philadelphia. ... “Yale” redirects here. ... Year 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Berkeley is a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in northern California, in the United States. ... The Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, is a private institution of higher learning located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. ... Duke University is a private coeducational research university located in Durham, North Carolina, USA. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. ... This article is about the University of Illinois at Chicago. ... Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Florida International University, commonly known as FIU, is a public research university whose main campus is located in University Park in metropolitan Miami, Florida, in the United States. ... The FIU College of Law logo The College of Law at Florida International University is one of the youngest American law schools. ...

Milton

Stanley Fish started his career as a medievalist. Despite this, his first book, published by Yale University Press in 1965, was on the 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, C.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. John Skelton (c. ...

Interpretive communities

As a literary theorist, Fish is best known for his analysis of interpretive communities — 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.”^[1] 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. Interpretive communities are a theoretical concept stemming from reader-response criticism and invented by Stanley Fish. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... “Write” redirects here. ...

Although Fish argues that the only possible meaning of a text is what the author intends, he claims that any actual attempt to access this is not possible. Any attempt to determine what exactly the author intended will result in nothing more than an interpretation based upon the interpretive community of the reader making the interpretation. Fish distinguishes the former as an epistemological point about what texts mean, whereas the latter is a sociological one about how claims about those meanings are produced.

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. 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." 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.[8] Lingua Franca was a magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia. ... Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (b. ... The girl he is having an affair with is Lindsey Lohan, and she has large breasts and feeds him bowls of ravioli whenver he beckons. ... Jonathan Goldberg is a literary theorist and Sir William Osler Professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University. ... The New York Times is an internationally known daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. ...

Fish and university politics

A prominent public intellectual and a hard man to pin down politically, Fish has spent considerable time in various public arenas vigorously debunking pieties of both the left and the right — sometimes in the same sentence. An intellectual is a person who uses their intellect to study, reflect, and speculate on a variety of different ideas. ... In politics, left-wing, political left, leftism, or simply the left, are terms that refer (with no particular precision) to the segment of the political spectrum typically associated with any of several strains of socialism, social democracy, or liberalism (especially but not exclusively in the American sense of the word... In politics, right-wing, the political right, or simply the right, are terms which refer, with no particular precision, to the segment of the political spectrum in opposition to left-wing politics. ...

In addition to his work in literary criticism, Fish has also written extensively on the politics of the university, having taken positions justifying campus speech codes and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise. For other uses, see Politics (disambiguation). ... For the community in Florida, see University, Florida. ... Hate speech is a controversial term for speech intended to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action against a person or group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, language ability, moral or political views, socioeconomic class, occupation or appearance...

Fish participated in a forum regarding the proper role of universities, which appeared in the September 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine; the article, in which Fish appeared alongside notable intellectuals David Gelernter, Lani Guinier, and Elizabeth Hoffman, was entitled: "Affirmative reaction: When Campus Republicans Play the Diversity Card." 2005 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December- → Deaths in September September 28 : Constance Baker Motley September 25 : M. Scott Peck September 25 : Don Adams September 20 : Simon Wiesenthal September 14 : Robert Wise September 10 : Hermann Bondi September 8 : Donald Horne September 7 : Moussa Arafat... “Harpers” redirects here. ... David Hillel Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University. ... Lani Guinier (born 1950) is arguably one of the foremost American civil rights scholars in the United States. ... Dr. Elizabeth (Betsy) Hoffman became the twentieth president of the three-campus University of Colorado system on September 1, 2000. ...

Fish has lectured across the country at many universities and colleges including Brown University, Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Georgia, the University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky, and Bates College, recently. Brown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island. ... Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... Alma Mater Columbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. ... The University of Georgia (UGA) is the largest institution of higher learning in the U.S. state of Georgia. ... Bates College is a private liberal arts college, founded in 1855 by abolitionists, located in Lewiston, Maine, in the United States. ...

Criticism

In her essay "Sophistry without Conventions," Martha Nussbaum eviscerates Stanley Fish's stance of "extreme relativism and even radical subjectivism." Discounting his work as nothing more than sophistry, Nussbaum demonstrates 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."^[2] Martha Nussbaum Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven on May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics. ... Sophism was originally a term for the techniques taught by a highly respected group of philosophy and rhetoric teachers in ancient Greece. ... John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, and The Law of Peoples. ... A Theory of Justice is a book of political and moral philosophy by John Rawls. ...

Camille Paglia, author of the landmark scholarly work Sexual Personae, denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogenous and sheltered ivory tower of Duke.^[3] Camille Anna Paglia (born April 2, 1947[1] in Endicott, New York) is an American social critic, intellectual, author and teacher. ... Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990, Yale University Press, 718 pp. ...

David Hirsch, a prominent critic of post-structuralist influences on hermeneutics, censured Fish for "lapses in logical rigor" and "carelessness toward rhetorical precision." With painstaking examination of Fish's arguments, Hirsch demonstrates 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, demonstrating that "what one critic weaves by day, another weaves by night." "Nor," he writes, "does this weaving and unweaving constitute a dialectic, since no forward movement takes place." Ultimately, Hirsche sees Fish as left to "wander in his own elysian fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."^[4] Beginning of the Odyssey The Odyssey (Greek Οδύσσεια (Odússeia)) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to the Ionian poet Homer. ... In Greek mythology, Elysium was a section of the Underworld (the spelling Elysium is a Latinization of the Greek word Elysion). ...

Notes and references

“Interpretive Assumptions and Interpreted Texts: On a Poem by Stanley Fish,” Essays in Literature, 11 (1984), 145-52.

Bibliography

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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 Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1972.
• "Interpreting the Variorum." Critical Inquiry (1976).
• "Why We Can't All Just Get Along." First Things (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.

Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) is book of literary criticism by American literary critic Stanley Fish. ... Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed journal in the humanities published out of the University of Chicago. ... First Things is a monthly ecumenical journal concerned with the creation of a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society (First Things website). ...

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 Court case of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell) in the name of "free speech."

• The Stanley Fish Reader. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

Federal courts Supreme Court Circuit Courts of Appeal District Courts Elections Presidential elections Midterm elections Political Parties Democratic Republican Third parties State & Local government Governors Legislatures (List) State Courts Local Government Other countries Atlas  US Government Portal      The Supreme Court of the United States (sometimes colloquially referred to by the... Holding The creators of parodies of public figures are protected against civil liability by the First Amendment, unless the parody includes false statements of fact made in knowing or reckless disregard of the truth. ...

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.

See Also

Formalism
New Criticism The term formalism describes an emphasis on form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy. ... New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. ...

External links

• 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 University. June 29, 2005.
• Stanley Fish article published in the Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism.
• Stanley Fish. Florida International University Law School faculty biography.
• Stanley Fish's blog at The New York Times Editorial section. (TimesSelect subscription required for accessing full texts.)
• Stanley Fish on Deconstruction. Radio interview with orogram host, Hugh LaFollette. WETS-FM. University of San Francisco. n.d. (Audio link.)
• Stanley Fish Resources Center. A self-published non-official website with links to various texts by and about Stanley Fish. Accessed December 23, 2006.