Stanley Fish

Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938 in Providence , Rhode Island ) is an American literary scholar and lawyer . The emeritus dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of English literature and legal theory at the University of Illinois in Chicago has taught as professor of humanities and law at Florida International University in Miami since 2005 .

In addition to work on literature, literary studies and linguistics in general, and John Milton or the English Renaissance in particular, Fish has also devoted himself to topics from psychoanalysis , philosophy and law .

Stanley Fish is considered to be an important neo-pragmatic observer of contemporary American society, but his work has so far received little attention in German-speaking countries. His engagement with and criticism of Jürgen Habermas , most recently in 2010, hardly caused a stir in Germany.

Fish is often attributed to postmodernism and "new historicism" , but describes himself as an "anti-fundamentalist" ( anti-foundationalism ).

Life

Fish grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, the eldest of four children in a Jewish family who lived in a block of flats in a typical lower middle class working class settlement - roots that he never made a secret of and that he always made explicit about known. His father, Max Fish, a Polish Jew, was an emigrant and plumber, his mother came from an educated family of furriers . The couple married in the early 1930s, although the mother's family had concerns about the social status of Fish, who had not attended school since he emigrated at the age of 15.

Fish was the first family member to attend college . In 1962 he received his PhD from Yale University . He also addressed the problem of his Jewish roots, which, according to his own statement, hindered him at the beginning of his career, when he was forced to adapt by his mostly Protestant colleagues.

Fish is married to the Americanist Jane Tompkins.

Professional background

Fish graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and received his PhD from Yale University in 1962 . He taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and at Johns Hopkins University before being Professor of English and Law at Duke University from 1986 to 1998 . This even though he did not have a law degree.

From 1999 to 2004 he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He was also appointed to the Political Science and Criminal Justice Departments, and served as Chairman of the Religious Studies Committee.

After resigning as dean of the University of Illinois due to a dispute with the state of Illinois over funding for the university, Fish taught English for a year. The Department of Humanities at the University of Illinois named a series of lectures after him.

In June 2005, he took the position of Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University . In November 2010, he joined the Board of Visitors at Ralston College, a newly formed facility based in Savannah , Georgia .

Fish also taught at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law , University of California , Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University , Columbia University, and Duke University .

Fish began his professional career as a medievalist , but his first book in 1965 was devoted to the Renaissance poet John Skelton . In his partially biographical essay Milton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour , he revealed that he had come to John Milton by pure chance : in 1963 - when Fish began his career as an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley - the young professor became asked to teach a course on Milton, despite the fact that he had never given a Milton course before. As a result of the course, he wrote Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost , which appeared in 1967. Fish's 2001 book How Milton Works reflects five decades of Milton's studies.

Literary theory

In his articles and books, Stanley Fish formulates the core thesis that all literature is basically about the reader, which is why the reader must be the actual object of literary analysis. Therefore, the reader must be in the center of the literature analysis, which is why he uses the term “text reading” instead of “text analysis”. From this he takes the pragmatic position that literary theory has no consequences - if only because they do not exist. With this point of view, according to which the meaning is not deciphered or taken from the text, Fish stands in a row with Umberto Eco , Jonathan Culler and also Wolfgang Iser . Nonetheless, German-language literary theory, including reader-oriented theories such as reception aesthetics , took little notice of this.

Fish was not only one of the first to consistently interpret an entire work from a reader-oriented perspective, but in a period of little more than ten years "publicly swore to many of his vehemently represented positions in a radicalism that is rarely seen in the field of science meets ".

John Milton

In 1967 - at a time when the predominance of " New Criticism " was still unbroken and structuralism was on the rise - Fish presented an interpretation of John Milton's epic poem in Blankversen Paradise Lost from 1667, at the center of which was not the text itself, but the reaction and transformation of the reader brought about by it. He was one of the first to put the reader problem up for discussion.

His choice of title "Surprised by Sin" (for example, "Surprised by sin") is programmatic: He sees the reader of Milton's work not only as a reading, passive subject, but rather as an active participant who in the course of reading himself in the event becomes entangled: he finds himself in paradise, is "seduced by satanic rhetoric with Adam and Eve" and loses his innocence in the process.

Fish assumes that Milton's Paradise Lost is not primarily about the Fall, but about the "humiliation and recovery of the reader". Milton wrote his work in such a way that the reader can make his own religious experiences in the reading process.

The reader as a text producer

Under the designation "affective stylistics", Fish presented a theoretical justification of the approach three years later, which became one of the most influential and most discussed texts of the current, which in the 1970s in the United States as "Reader-Response Theory" ( Reader Response theory ) became known. With this literary theory, too, Fish aroused a lot of attention in the American literary scene after his original Milton interpretation.

Fish dealt with the conventional formalistic practice of interpretation, in which the text is analyzed as an objectively filled size and the originally temporal experience of reading is transformed into a spatial (and thus also static) size by means of tables, diagrams, structural analyzes and so on . Fish now advocated the widely criticized theory that there is no determined text or word meaning, but that every word and every statement in its meaning depends on the respective context.

The reader-response theory emerged as a response to the current of " New Criticism ", which placed the text in the center and emphasized that only what is "in" a text can also be part of the meaning of that text. The intention of the author and the psychology of the reader are not only irrelevant for followers of this direction in the analysis of literary works, they play no role at all in exegesis , whereas the reader-response critique of the role of the reader in generating the meaning attaches great importance to a literary work. Fish sees the reader as an active agent who gives the work true existence.

Stanley Fish subsequently developed, based on the reader-response theory, one of the most controversial and radical theories, according to which the meaning is completely context-dependent and for this reason there is no fixed literal meaning.

Communities of interpretation

According to Fish, meaning is not to be found in the text, but with the reader or in the “interpretive communities”, which are defined by the acceptance of a general set of assumptions and texts. With this theory, Fish wants to explain that meaning can only be possible in the context of certain communities of interpretation, even under the deconstructivist position that no privileged reading of a text exists.

For Fish, knowledge is not objective, but always socially conditioned. For Fish, everything we know and what we think is merely an interpretation that is only shaped and made possible by the social context in which we live. The thoughts of an individual are only possible through the preconditions of the community in which he is located. The socially conditioned individual cannot think beyond the boundaries of his culture, whereby he calls this culture “community of interpretation”. It offers us certain - always limited - opportunities to read a text. He describes them as follows:

"If what follows is communication or understanding, it will not be because he and I share a language, in the sense of knowing the meanings of individual words and the rules for combining them, but because a way of thinking, a form of life, shares us, and implicates us in a world of already-in-place objects, purposes, goals, procedures, values, and so on; and it is to the features of that world that any words we utter will be heard as necessarily referring. "
(If what follows is communication or understanding, it will not be because he and I share a language in that sense knowing the meaning of individual words and the rules for combining them, but because a way of thinking, a way of life, connects us and entangles us in a world of already well-sorted objects, purposes, goals, processes, values, and so on; and it is one of the features of this world that all the words we utter are heard as unconditionally related.)

For Fish, the different readings of a text are culturally constructed, and for him literature reflects the values and ideas of the culture from which they originate. However, it is never to be clearly delineated who belongs to a certain interpretive community and who does not, how these interpretive communities overlap and in how many different interpretive communities we operate, because, according to Fish, there are numerous such communities that do not exist statically next to one another, but constantly Change.

Reception and criticism

Fish is one of the most colorful figures in the North American literary scene, in particular his literary theoretical work on the contribution of reading is controversially discussed.

With his later work he is considered an agent provocateur and is criticized as a polemicist ; The American literary critic Geoffrey Galt Harpman called him in the 1990 literary supplement of the Times “the most quoted, most controversial, most sought-after and most feared English teacher in the world - and one of the best essayists in all fields” ( “most quoted, most controversial, most in demand and most feared English teachers in the world - and one of the best essayists in any field ” ) Valentine Cunningham , Fish student and professor at Oxford University , described his lectures as“ mentally dirty and morally disgusting ”.

In 1985 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Works (selection)

1965: John Skelton's poetry.
1967: Surprised by sin: the reader lost in Paradise.
1971: Seventeenth-century prose; modern essays in criticism.
1971: New essays on Paradise Lost.
1972: Self-consuming artifacts: the experience of seventeenth-century literature.
1974: Self-consuming artifacts: the experience of 17th century literature.
1978: The living temple: George Herbert and catechizing.
1980: Is there a text in this class ?: The authority of interpretive communities.
1983: Fish versus Fiss: rules practices and power in the law and literary criticism.
1989: Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary & Legal Studies.
1994: The Law Wishes to Have a Formal Existence.
1994: There's no such thing as free speech, and it's a good thing, too.
1995: With Mortal Voice: Milton Defends Against the Muse.
1995: Professional correctness: literary studies and political change.
1995: How to write a sentence: and how to read one.
1999: The trouble with principle.
2001: How Milton Works.
2001: With the compliments of the author: reflections on Austin and Derrida.
2008: Save the world on your own time.
2009: The fugitive in flight: faith, liberalism, and law in a classic tv show:
2011: How to Write a Sentence.
2011: The law wants to be formal. Essays . Edited by Heinz Bude and Michael Dellwing, Suhrkamp, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-518-29608-0 .

literature

Harold Aram Veeser: The Stanley Fish reader. Blackwell Publishers, 1999. ISBN 0-631-20439-3
Christina Schmitt: A comparison of Stanley Fish's and Helmuth Feilke's theories on the process of understanding. GRIN Verlag, 2008. ISBN 3-638-92219-7
Moisés Mayordomo-Marín: Hear the beginning: reader-oriented Gospel exegesis using the example of Matthew 1 - 2. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. ISBN 3-525-53864-2
Pil Dahlerup: Deconstruction: The Literary Theory of the 1990s. Walter de Gruyter, 1998. ISBN 3-11-015516-8

Individual evidence

↑ Michael Dellwing: Journal for Legal Sociology 29 (2008), Issue 1. pp. 261–278.

↑ Does Reason Know What It Is Missing? dated April 12, 2010 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2
↑ Baldacchino, Joseph: Humanitas. Two Kinds of Criticism: Reflective Self-Scrutiny vs. Impulsive self-validation
^ The Stanley Fish Reader. P. 2
^ Stanley Fish: Max the plumber. In opionator. November 2, 2008.
↑ Doing What Comes Naturally. P. 30 f
^ "... had never - either as an undergraduate or in graduate school - taken a Milton course ..." p. 269
^ Pil Dahlerup: Deconstruction: the literary theory of the 1990s. P. 4
↑ Jürg Glauser: Text and Time. Repetition, variant and series as constituents of literary transmission. Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. ISBN 3-8260-2234-3 . P. 185
↑ Moisés Mayordomo-Marín: Hear the beginning. P. 41.
^ Pil Dahlerup: Deconstruction: the literary theory of the 1990s. P. 4
↑ Moisés Mayordomo-Marín: Hear the beginning. P. 41
^ Pil Dahlerup: Deconstruction: the literary theory of the 1990s. P. 5
↑ Christina Schmitt: A comparison of the theories Stanley Fish and Helmuth Feilke on the process of understanding. P. 7
↑ Christina Schmitt: A comparison of the theories Stanley Fish and Helmuth Feilke on the process of understanding. P. 5
↑ Christina Schmitt: A comparison of the theories Stanley Fish and Helmuth Feilke on the process of understanding. P. 19
^ Fish, Is There A Text In This Class ?. Pp. 303/304.
↑ Christina Schmitt: A comparison of the theories Stanley Fish and Helmuth Feilke on the process of understanding.
↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from January 9, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2
^ The Stanley Fish Reader. P. 2

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Fish, Stanley
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Fish, Stanley Eugene (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH	April 19, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH	Providence , Rhode Island

[1] Michael Dellwing: Journal for Legal Sociology 29 (2008), Issue 1. pp. 261–278.