Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fish ( born April 19, 1938 in Providence, Rhode Iceland ) is an American literary scholar and jurist. Emeritus dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of English Literature and Legal Theory at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 2005, teaches as a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University in Miami.
Fish has devoted in addition to works on literature, literature and linguistics in general and John Milton and the English Renaissance in particular also issues from the psychoanalysis, philosophy, or law.
Stanley Fish is considered an important neopragmatischer observer of contemporary American society, but in the German-speaking countries, his work has so far received little attention. His confrontation with and his critique of Jürgen Habermas, most recently in 2010 aroused in Germany hardly stir.
Fish is often attributed to postmodernism and the "new historicism ," but describes himself as an "anti - fundamentalist " (anti- foundationalism ).
Life
Fish grew up in Providence, Rhode Iceland, as the eldest of four children in a Jewish family who lived in a block of a typical working class neighborhood of lower U.S. middle class - roots from which he never made a secret and to which he always explicitly known. His father, Max Fish, a Polish Jew, was an emigrant and plumber, his mother came from an educated family furrier. The couple married in the early 1930s, although the mother's family had concerns about the social position of Fishs, who had not attended school since his emigration at the age of 15 years.
Fish was the first family member who attended college. In 1962 he earned his doctorate at Yale University. He also addressed the issue of his Jewish roots, which, in his own words, at the beginning of his career hindered him when he was under the forced adaptation of his Protestant majority colleagues
Fish is married to the Americanist Jane Tompkins.
Professional career
Fish graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and received his PhD in 1962 at Yale University. He taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before he was from 1986 to 1998 professor of English and law at Duke University. This, even though he had not completed a law degree.
From 1999 to 2004 he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was also appointed to the departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice, and served as Chairman of the " Religious Studies Committee ".
After his resignation as dean of the University of Illinois because of a dispute with the State of Illinois on the financing of the university, Fish a year teaching in the English Department. The Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois named a lecture series after him.
In June 2005, he assumed the position of professor of humanities and law at Florida International University. In November 2010 he joined the Board of Visitors of Ralston College, a newly created organization, headquartered 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 partly biographical essay Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour, he revealed that he had come by chance to John Milton: 1963 - as Fish as an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley began his career - was the young professor asked to lead a course on Milton, despite the fact that he had previously never held a Milton course. As a result of the course he wrote Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, published in 1967. Fish's book How Milton Works from 2001 reflects five decades studying Milton.
Literary theory
In his articles and books Stanley Fish formulated the core thesis that all literature basically handle the reader, so the reader must make his real object of literary analysis. Therefore, the reader must be at the center of the analysis of the literature, which is why he called " text reading " used instead of " text analysis ". From this he refers to the pragmatic position that literary theory has no consequences - if only because it they did not exist. With this point of view, according to which the meaning is not decrypted or removed from the text, Fish is in a row with Umberto Eco, Jonathan Culler and Wolfgang Iser. Nevertheless, took the German -language literary theory, not even the reader -oriented theories, such as the aesthetics of reception, of which only little notice.
Fish was not only one of the first to systematically expounded a whole work of reader -oriented perspective, but vowed in a span of little more than ten years, " many of his vehement positions taken in a radical public on how they are rarely in the field of science encounters ".
John Milton
1967 - was at a time when the supremacy of the " New Criticism " still unbroken and structuralism on the rise - laid Fish an interpretation of John Milton's epic poem in blank verse Paradise Lost of 1667 before, in the center and not the text itself, but the reaction brought about by him and change the reader's state. He was one of the first to put the reader issues for discussion.
His choice of title " Surprised by Sin " (about " surprised by sin " ) is programatically: He sees the reader of Milton's work not only as -read, passive subject, as only contemplative, but rather as active Participating who even in the course of reading the events are involved: He finds himself in paradise, is " seduced Adam and Eve from satanic rhetoric " and loses his innocence.
Fish anticipates Milton's Paradise Lost NOT TRADE primarily from the Fall, but from the " humiliation and restoration of the reader ." Milton had his work written so that the reader make their own religious experiences in the reading process.
The reader as a text producer
The term " affective stylistics " laid Fish three years later a theoretical justification of the procedure before that the flow became one of the most influential and most discussed texts in the 1970s in the United States as " reader response theory " ( Reader response Theory ) has been known. Even with this literary theory aroused Fish in the U.S. literary scene after his original Milton - interpretation much attention.
Fish continued with the conventional formalistic interpretation practice apart, where the text analyzed as an objectively filled with meaning size and the original temporal experience of reading by means of tables, diagrams, structure analysis, and so on into a spatial (and therefore static ) variable is. Fish now took the much criticized theory that there is no deterministic text or give word meaning, but every word and statement in his or her importance should each context specific.
The reader -response theory arose in response to the flow of the " New Criticism ", which put the text in the center, emphasizing only what is "in" a text that could also be part of the meaning of this text. The intention of the author and the psychology of the reader, for the followers of this direction in the analysis of literary works not only irrelevant, they play no role in exegesis, whereas the reader -response criticism precisely the role of the reader in the creation of meaning a literary work of great importance attaches. Fish sees the reader as an active agent who gives the work real existence.
Stanley Fish subsequently developed, modeled on the reader -response theory, one of the most controversial and radical theories, according to which the meaning is completely context-dependent and there is no fixed literal meaning of this.
Interpretation Communities
Meaning is, according to Fish to be found not in the text but in the reader or in the " community of interpretation " ( interpretive communities ), which is 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 interpretation of communities, even under the deconstructive position that no privileged reading of a text exist.
For Fish Knowledge is not objective, but always socially conditioned. Everything we know and what we think is for Fish only interpretation that is only shaped by the social context in which we live and made possible. The thoughts of an individual are only made possible by the conditions of the community in which it is located. The socially conditioned individual can not think beyond the boundaries of its culture also, where he calls this culture " community of interpretation ". They offer us certain - always limited - ways to read a text. He describes it as follows:
The different readings of a text are culturally constructed for Fish and literature reflected for him the values and ideas of the culture they come from. However, it was never precisely defined, who belongs to a certain community of interpretation and who does not like to overlap this interpretation Communities and in how many different interpretation Communities we move, because there are to Fish numerous such communities, not static -exist, but in a constant change are understood ..
Reception and criticism
Fish is one of the most colorful figures of the North American literary scene, especially his literary theoretical work on the contribution of reading are discussed controversially.
With his late works, he is regarded as agent provocateur and is criticized as a polemicist; the American literary critic Geoffrey Galt Harpman called him in 1990 in the literary supplement of the Times, " the most frequently cited, the 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 teacher in the world - and one of the best essayists in any field " ) Valentine Cunningham, Fish -student and professor at Oxford University, described his lectures, however, as" dirty mentally and morally disgusting ".