Stanley Fish

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Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938) is an American

Fish is associated with

During his career he has also taught at the

Fish was born in Providence, Rhode Island.^[3] He was raised Jewish.^[4] His father, an immigrant from Poland, was a plumber and contractor who made it a priority for his son to get a university education.^[5][4] Fish became the first member of his family to attend college in the US, earning a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959 and an M.A. from Yale University in 1960.^[6][7] He completed his Ph.D. in 1962, also at Yale University.^[6]

Academic career

Fish taught English at the

In November 2010 he joined the board of visitors of Ralston College, a start-up institution in Savannah, Georgia.^[12] He has also been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985.^[13]

In April 2024, New College of Florida described him as presidential scholar in residence in invitations to a discussion with Mark Bauerlein on free speech, academic freedom, and political expression.^[14]

Milton

Fish started his career as a

Our every likely value is defeated by his poetry. His book needs to presume that we find Milton's beliefs, and even more the sheer force of those beliefs, inimical. It never occurs to Fish that the

ever-abused "reader" might share any values with Milton… Even when he has a point, Fish is wrestling Milton to his cause. There is no room to consider that Milton's poetry might be wise about human weakness, and that Paradise Lost, for instance, might be more notable for its sense of tragedy than for its doctrinal correctness.^[15]

Fish is best known for his analysis of interpretive communities — an offshoot of reader-response criticism. His 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."^[16] In the context of literary criticism, he 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.^{[citation needed]}

Fish and university politics

Fish has written extensively on the politics 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.^[17]

He argued in January 2008 on his New York Times-syndicated blog that the

Fish has lectured across the US 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, San Diego State University, the University of Kentucky, Bates College, the University of Central Florida, the University of West Florida, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.^{[citation needed]}

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 for students, matched by their 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.^[19]

Criticisms of his work

As a frequent contributor to The New York Times^[20] and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fish has been the target of wide-ranging criticism.

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."^[21]

Likewise, among academics, Fish has endured vigorous criticism. The conservative R. V. Young writes,

Because his general understanding of human nature and of the human condition is false, Fish fails in the specific task of a university scholar, which requires that learning be placed in the service of truth. And this, finally, is the critical issue in the contemporary university of which Stanley Fish is a typical representative: sophistry renders truth itself equivocal and deprives scholarly learning of its reason for being... . His brash disdain of principle and his embrace of sophistry reveal the hollowness hidden at the heart of the current academic enterprise.^[22]

Terry Eagleton, a prominent British Marxist,^[23] 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." 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."^[24]

In the essay "Sophistry about Conventions", philosopher

He is married to literary critic Jane Tompkins.^[28]

Literary references

Stanley Fish has been parodied in two novels by David Lodge in which he appears as "Morris Zapp".^[15]

Awards

Fish received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 1994 for There's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too.

Bibliography

Primary works by 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 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 978-0-674-46726-2
  (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.
• Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• [2]*Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution. Chicago, IL:
  ISBN 978-0-226-06431-4
  .
• Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom. New York, NY:
  ISBN 978-0-062-22665-5
  .
• The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump. Atria/One Signal Publishers. 2019
  ISBN 9781982115241
  .

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.
• Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education, Princeton, (2015),
  ISBN 9780691167718

• Formalism
• New Criticism

Notes and references

Further reading

• Robertson, Michael. Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law. Cambridge University Press, 2014
• Olson, Gary A. Stanley Fish, America's Enfant Terrible: The Authorized Biography. Carbondale: SIU P, 2016.
• 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"[3]
• Landa, José Ángel García "Stanley E. Fish's Speech Acts"[4]
• Pierre Schlag, "Fish v. Zapp--The Case of the Relatively Autonomous Self," 76 Georgetown Law Journal 37 (1988)

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to 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 University. June 29, 2005.
• Stanley Fish Archived November 1, 2005, at the Wayback Machine 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.
• Stanley Fish on Deconstruction Archived September 6, 2008, at the Wayback Machine. Radio interview with program host, Hugh LaFollette. WETS-FM. University of San Francisco. n.d. (Audio link.)
• WorldCat Identities page for Stanley Eugene Fish
• Appearances on C-SPAN

Archival collections

• Guide to the Stanley Fish Papers. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California