SOURCE: A review of Self-Consuming Artifacts, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 32, No. 4, Summer, 1974, pp. 572-73.

In the following review of Self-Consuming Artifacts, Uphaus finds contradictions in Fish's Platonic-Christian perspective and “anti-aesthetic” argument.

For readers of this journal, the importance of Fish’s book [Self-Consuming Artifacts] rests with his challenge to the dominant assumption of the autonomy of art objects. Although Fish’s principal subject is the literature of seventeenth-century England, particularly that literature informed by a combination of Platonic and Christian assumptions, it is the discussions in the first chapter and in his well-known essay on “affective stylistics” (inserted as an appendix to this book) that form the core of Fish’s aesthetic or, more likely, anti-aesthetic. The first four pages of the book, in fact, enumerate the four theses, “at once discrete and independent,” on which the remainder of the book is based. These...