IS THERE A TEXT IN THIS CLASS?--Stanley Fish

IS THERE A TEXT IN THIS CLASS?

Summary prepared for research scholars of Indian Universities by S. Sreekumar

Stanley Fish’s arguments in this essay are based on the conviction that the text is not a stable thing with a determinate meaning. Fish narrates the anecdote of a fresher who asked: “Is there a text in this class?” and the professor who answered: ‘Yes, it’s the Norton Anthology of Literature’. This reply forced the student to clarify thus: “No, No, I mean in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it just us?”

INTERPRETING THE VARIORUM

INTERPRETING THE VARIORUM

[This essay was prescribed for Annamalai University MPhil]

Stanley Fish

S

tanley Fish is a leading exponent of American ‘Reader-response’ criticism. His book on Milton Surprised by Sin was subtitled, ‘The Reader in Paradise Lost’. Fish argues that the reader in the book is constantly lured into mistakes of interpretation by the ambiguities of Milton’s syntax, and thus compelled to recognize his own ‘fallen state’.

I

NTRODUCTION

In the present essay Fish questions New Criticism’s efforts to locate literary meaning in the formal features of the text, rather than on the author’s intention or the reader’s response— “The intentional Fallacy” and  “The Affective Fallacy”— and argues:

à Both authorial intention and formal features are produced by the interpretive assumptions and procedures the reader brings to the text.

à Authorial intention and formal features have no prior existence outside the reading experience.