Fish?

[Paul Mackin]

Thanks, Josh. Fish sounds like he's smack in the middle of things. It's
certainly good that theorists continue to point out the mistakes of other
theorists and that in the end the best of the mistakes are 
uncorrectable--as proved by three thousand years of philosophy--because
it's a constant reminder that no theory can be perfect and that the
goodness of this or that particular lit theory is only as good as it is
helpful in confronting a particular piece of lit.

The preceeding contains errors but that's OK.

				P.

On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Josh Kortbein wrote:

> 
> 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/
>