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Stanley Eugene Fish | |
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| Born | (1938-04-19)April 19, 1938 (age 87) |
| Occupations |
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| Spouse | Jane Tompkins |
| Academic background | |
| Education | |
Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938) is an Americanliterary theorist,legal scholar,author andpublic intellectual. He is the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law atYeshiva University'sBenjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.[1] Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law atFlorida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago.
Fish is associated withpostmodernism, although he views himself instead as an advocate ofanti-foundationalism.[2] He is also viewed as having influenced the rise and development ofreader-response theory.
Fish has also taught at theCardozo School of Law,University of California, Berkeley,Johns Hopkins University,The University of Pennsylvania,Yale Law School,Columbia University,The John Marshall Law School, andDuke University.
Fish was born inProvidence, Rhode Island.[3] He was raised Jewish.[4] His father, an immigrant fromPoland, 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 aB.A. from theUniversity of Pennsylvania in 1959 and anM.A. fromYale University in 1960.[6][7] He completed hisPh.D. in 1962, also atYale University.[6]
Fish taught English at theUniversity of California at Berkeley andJohns Hopkins University before serving as Arts and Sciences Professor of English and professor of law atDuke University from 1986 to 1998. From 1999 to 2004, he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago, and he served as distinguished visiting professor at theJohn Marshall Law School from 2000 until 2002.[6] Fish also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice and was the chairman of the Religious Studies Committee.[8]
During his tenure there, he recruited professors respected in the academic community, and attracted attention to the college.[9] After resigning as dean in a high-level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC,[10] Fish spent a year teaching in the Department of English. The Institute for the Humanities at UIC named a lecture series in his honor, which is still ongoing.[11] In June 2005, he accepted the position of Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law atFlorida International University, teaching in theFIU College of Law.
In November 2010 he joined the board of visitors ofRalston College, a start-up institution inSavannah, Georgia.[12] He has also been a Fellow of theAmerican 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 withMark Bauerlein on free speech, academic freedom, and political expression.[14]
Fish started his career as amedievalist. His first book, published byYale University Press in 1965, was on the late-medieval/early-Renaissance poetJohn Skelton. Fish explains in his partly biographical essay, "Milton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour" (published inThere's No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . And It's a Good Thing, Too), that he came to Milton by accident. In 1963, the year Fish started as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, its resident Miltonist,Constantinos Patrides, received a grant. The chair of the department asked Fish to teach the Milton course, notwithstanding that Fish "had never—either as an undergraduate or in graduate school—taken a Milton course" (269). The eventual result wasSurprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; rpt. 1997). Fish's 2001 bookHow Milton Works reflects five decades of his scholarship on Milton. Academic and criticJohn Mullan disagrees with Fish's interpretation:
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 theever-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 thatParadise 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 ofinterpretive communities — an offshoot ofreader-response criticism. His work in this field examines how the interpretation of atext 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 calledlinguistic 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 has written extensively on thepolitics of theuniversity, having taken positions supporting campusspeech 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 hisNew York Times-syndicated blog that thehumanities are of noinstrumental value, but have onlyintrinsic worth. He explains, "To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said diminishes the object of its supposed praise."[18]
Fish has lectured across the US at many universities and colleges includingFlorida Atlantic University,Brown University,Baylor University, the University of Pennsylvania,Harvard University,University of Toronto,Columbia University, theUniversity of Vermont, theUniversity of Georgia, theUniversity of Louisville,San Diego State University, theUniversity of Kentucky,Bates College, theUniversity of Central Florida, theUniversity of West Florida, and theBenjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.[19]
As chair of the Duke English department from 1986 to 1992, Fish attracted attention and controversy. Fish, according toLingua 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 ofThe New York Times.[20]
As a frequent contributor toThe New York Times[21] andThe Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fish has been the target of wide-ranging criticism.
Writing inSlate 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."[22]
Likewise, among academics, Fish has endured vigorous criticism. The conservativeR. 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.[23]
Terry Eagleton, a prominent British Marxist,[24] excoriates Fish's "discreditableepistemology" as "sinister". According to Eagleton, "Like almost all diatribes againstuniversalism, 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."[25]
In the essay "Sophistry about Conventions", philosopherMartha Nussbaum argues that Fish's theoretical views are based on "extreme relativism and even radical subjectivism." Discounting his work as nothing more thansophistry, Nussbaum claims that Fish "relies on the regulative principle of non-contradiction in order to adjudicate between competing principles", thereby relying on normative standards of argumentation even as he argues against them. Offering an alternative, Nussbaum citesJohn Rawls's work inA Theory of Justice to highlight "an example of a rational argument; it can be said to yield, in a perfectly recognizable sense, ethical truth." Nussbaum appropriates Rawls's critique of the insufficiencies of Utilitarianism, showing that a rational person will consistently prefer a system of justice that acknowledges boundaries between separate persons rather than relying on the aggregation of the sum total of desires. "This", she claims, "is altogether different from rhetorical manipulation."[26]
Camille Paglia, author ofSexual Personae andpublic intellectual, denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogeneous and sheltered ivory tower of Duke.[27]
David Hirsch, a critic of post-structuralist influences onhermeneutics, censured Fish for "lapses in logical rigor" and "carelessness toward rhetorical precision." In an examination of Fish's arguments, Hirsch attempts to demonstrate that "not only was a restoration of New Critical methods unnecessary, but that Fish himself had not managed to rid himself of the shackles of New Critical theory." Hirsch compares Fish's work to Penelope's loom in theOdyssey, stating, "what one critic weaves by day, another unweaves by night." "Nor," he writes, "does this weaving and unweaving constitute a dialectic, since no forward movement takes place." Ultimately, Hirsch sees Fish as left to "wander in his ownElysian fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."[28]
He is married to literary criticJane Tompkins.[29]
Stanley Fish has been parodied in two novels byDavid Lodge in which he appears as "Morris Zapp".[15]
Fish received thePEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 1994 forThere's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too.
