Stanley Fish (b.1938) is a paradoxical academic figure, as while he
has come to be identified as an icon of the new literary criticism
(the "New Readers" school, along with Derrida and
Bloom), his academic origins are in Milton and (other) 17th Century poetry, very traditional areas
of literary study. What is wonderful and remarkable about Fish's
scholarship is that, almost in a Hegelian way he has
devoted his career to finding syntheses among disputing academic
camps, theories and ideas.
From the beginning, Fish was interested in where meaning was located
in the act of readership, the interaction between reader and text. In
1971, when he published Surprised by Sin, the book that made
him famous, there were two prevailing academic camps about Milton.
The first (whose origins date from William Blake) claims that in
writing "Paradise Lost" Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it",
essentially that Milton (consciously or not) has made the Devil
appealing, and the center of the action and narrative of the poem,
whereas Adam, Eve and God are lofty, boring, and allowed to fade into
the background. (If you have ever read Paradise Lost, you know exactly what I'm talking about.) In other words, that Milton's intentions were to
inspire the reader with the glory of God, and (symmetrically) to show
the baseness, depravity and evil of the Devil and his minions, but his
poetry achieves exactly the opposite. The other academic camp,
consisting of literary theologists like C.S. Lewis, found this idea
repulsive and claims that the poem is a straightforward glorification
of the divine, and does not work against itself.
Surprised by Sin ingeniously unifies these ideas by suggesting
that it is the act of readership that is important; when the
reader finds Satan and his fellow cast-out angels appealing it is tantamount to the
realization that we are fallen from grace. That is, we are living in a
postlapsarian world of temptation, imperfect communication and fallen
language that is a consequence of the ejection from the garden, the
central event of the poem. It is only natural then, that in reading
the poem we find Satan to be more persuasive, charismatic and
enticing. To realize this is to contemplate our separation from the
divine, and is exactly the point. In other words, the poem is a giant
"gotcha!", and on purpose. The idea absolutely revolutionized Milton
scholarship, and launched Fish into the limelight of academic literary
criticism.
As his career progressed, he became more and more interested in the
reader-text relationship, and by the time he published another seminal
work, Is There a Text in This Class? (1980; a collection of
essays he wrote in the 1970s) he had revised and expanded his ideas
on the centrality of the reader in the textual experience. Now
there was an "interpretive community" that collectively decided on the
meaning and importance of texts. In a reflexive way, texts as literary
objects are called into existence by the act of readership, interpretation
and (eventually) scholarly consensus.
By now you may see where this is going, because such a theory has a
direct bearing on canonicity and the political correctness debate that
came to the forefront of literary academia in the 1990s. The
importance of Fish's "interpretive community" is that it is a function of
time, space, social norms and other historical accidents rather than
any sort of absolute. This idea is expressed beautifully in
There's No Such Thing As Free Speech (1994), where Fish goes
after both the intellectual left for its blind faith in relativism and political
correctness, and the right for its presupposition of and reliance on
values it claims are universal, timeless and immutable.
Stanley Fish is currently Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke University.
Thanks to: my Milton professor, who was one of Fish's graduate students at Yale and taught me most everything I know about the 17th century, and Critical Theory Since 1965 (ed. Adams, Searle) which I used to check the dates