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

The average rating for Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-21 00:00:00 Brendan Young The subtitle of this book ought to be "Stanley Fish Deconstructs Himself". This is a collection of essays on literary theory by literary critic Stanley Fish. The book is interesting throughout, but of particular interest is how it is organized. Fish states, right from the introduction, that the perspective from which the bulk of the essays was written is wrong. Fish began his journey into literary theory as a reader-response theorist. That is, he believed that there is no objective text, but the text is created through the experience of reading. He then made several moves to sidestep the radical implications of this theory; drawing on psychology and Chomsky's universal grammar to try and thread the needle between saying there is one strictly correct reading, and there are no correct readings. In the introduction to the book, Fish says that this move implicitly reintroduced the text as the objective factor; in creating a stable, if flexible, reading experience, he was all but recreating the notion of a stable text. So any time he advanced arguments which effectively undermined the partisans of stable texts, he also undermined his own position. The introduction fleshes out not only his mistakes, but how they led him to the conclusion ultimately embraced in the last quarter to a third of the book. As the actual subtitle implies, he centers his theory on interpretative communities. In a way readers create texts, but it is more accurate to say that communities create the conditions for creating texts---and yet more accurate to say that communities create both readers and texts. I will not here delve into the subtleties of this argument, which is well worth the price of admission, but Fish advances it masterfully. In creating a book that centers so much on reader experience, Fish also cultivated a unique experience for his reader. The deconstruction of his journey in the introduction is followed by opening statements at the beginning of each essay, talking about the circumstances, strengths, and fatal flaws of what you are about to read. This created a useful tension for me---I could see problems straightaway, but I wasn't sure if I was seeing them because they were obvious or because Fish had given them away from the start. Progressing through the book feels much like watching someone work out a problem by sketching solutions again and again. The reader-response section shifts subtly as you go along, in response to criticisms he received at the time. He also includes an interesting discussion of Speech Act Theory, which is an excellent essay in its own right. In general I felt the pleasure of seeing a clearly intellectually curious person attending to their own growth, and owning the mistakes made along the way. It does not hurt that Fish is an excellent stylist, bringing wit and bravado into the dry subject of literary theory. And once you have done the work of following through his reader-response phase, you can more plainly see how interpretive communities sweep away a lot of conceptual problems. Of course, they also create problems of their own---but the structure of the book leads me to believe that that is exactly what he wanted you to see. If you wanted to dip your toes into literary theory, or have ever wondered about the nature of meaning, you could do worse than starting here.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-18 00:00:00 David Ortiz In lieu of a review, here are a few suggested alternative titles for Mr. Fish: "Literature in the Reader" -> "Let Me Put My Reader in You" "What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?" -> "This Is Stylistics, Now Let Me Say A Bunch of Terrible Things about It" "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" -> "I Don't Need to Be Right, Only Interesting: Or, the Fish-Trump Theorem" "Interpreting the Variorum" -> "I'm A Dog Chasing Its Tail, But So Are You All So It's All the Same, Except It Isn't Cause I Can Chase My Tail Better" "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle" -> "I've Also Read Strawson and Wittgenstein!"