Fish?

[Josh Kortbein]

Muchasmasgracias at cs.com writes:
>I've bumped into Judith Butler('s work), but who's Stanley Fish?  Where's he 
>at?

>From _Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature_
(ed. Richter), here's the intro to Fish's (relatively) famous
"Is There a Text in This Class?".

The agent provacateur of contemporary literary theory, Stanley
Fish was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1938, and educated
at the University of Pennsylvania and at Yale, which published
his dissertation on English poet and scholar John Skelton (1965),
Fish taught at the University of California at Berkeley until 1974,
then moved on to Johns Hopkins, and is currently at Duke University.
Fish is concurrently chair of the English Department and professor
in the Law School. Though he has no formal legal training, Fish's
theoretical work on interpretive communities and the way they
constitute the meaning of ambiguous texts has proved to be as
important for jurisprudence (the theory of legal interpretation)
as for literary theory. Whereas Fish once limited his attacks
to individual theorists (like Wolfgang Iser) or fields of
criticism (like linguistics and stylistics), he has most
recently attacked theory itself (both literary and legal) as
pointless - impotent to constrain the will-to-power of interpretation.
Fish's career as a gadfly began with his second book, _Surprised
by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost_ (1967), which insisted on
constructing (contrary to the then-current dogma of the New
Criticism) the reader's experience of Milton's epic. The object
of Fish's concern has shifted from the implied reader within the
text, in _Self-Consuming Artifacts_ (1972), to the experience
of actual readers and interpretive communities, in _Is There
a Text in This Class?_ (1980), to the practice of theory itself
in _Doing What Comes Naturally_ (1990).

Not all that substantial, but a start. There's a bit of Fish
stuff on the web; poke around.




Josh
NP: John Zorn, _Circle Maker_

-- 
josh blog: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kortbein/blog/
      tdr: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kortbein/tdr/