Stanley Eugene Fish Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Stanley Eugene Fish

To say that Stanley Fish is among the most influential critics writing in English is not at all to say that he is followed by an admiring flock. Twice a pioneer in making critical possibilities available--first by rescuing affective criticism from the strictures of William K. Wimsatt and Monroe E. Beardsley and then by domesticating for literary theory the concept of "interpretive community"--Fish has had no difficulty in becoming widely known and understood, aided by his lucid, forceful, and colloquially unbuttoned style; but his views are treated typically by those who encounter them as frustrating impasses to be bracketed, suppressed, or with luck surmounted. His opponents frequently take comfort in the belief that he is a "reductive" thinker, forgetting that it is in overriding the escape clauses and revisionary qualifications of the "Kuhnian revolution" of which he is a part (in his work since the early 1970s) that he is able so efficiently to wield Occam's razor--or that other reductio to which Fish often refers, "Augustine's rule of faith." One is instructed in any case by the radically surgical quality of the "good physician" (Self-Consuming Artifacts, chapter 1) in Fish's arguments rather more than by their conceptual categories--of which, as everything he has ever written at once insists and confesses, he is not the producer but the product.

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