Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities

By Stanley Fish

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674467264
• ISBN13: 9780674467262
• Release Date: June 1982
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Literature Is What You Make It

Fish provides an originally shocking, but now almost taken-for-granted, argument: there is no such thing as meaning sitting around in a book waiting to be mined like a physical object. Rather, everyone who comes to a book finds exactly what they were looking for in the first place. And the rules for what they find, and what is considered "acceptable" interpretation, comes not from some magic rule for all time but from particular groups of readers at particular times and places. Using Milton, Shakespeare, the students from his history as a literature professor at Johns Hopkins, and various other texts of all kinds, Fish makes a remarkable and witty argument for the stable but temporary interpretation of literature. There is no literature except what you call literature. So, the text doesn't tell you what it means. The reader doesn't decide what it means. The meaning in reading anything comes from the act of reading itself, shaped by the rules of the interpretive community.

Fish is not your average philosopher

I got this book from the footnotes of Nancey Murphy's "Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism" and various Stanley Hauerwas books. To the point, I had only read snippets of his writing. After seeing his work, I know that I still have a lot more learning to do. Looking forward to reading more of his stuff.

Standing Before Sterling, Young Stanley Conceives His Calling

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