Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities

Stanley Fish

ISBN 10: 0674467264 / ISBN 13: 9780674467262

Verlag: Harvard University Press, 1980

Beschreibung

First Edition, Sixth Printing. Published by Harvard University Press, 1980. Octavo. Paperback. Book is very good with shelf wear. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 309288

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority...

Verlag: Harvard University Press

Erscheinungsdatum: 1980

Einband: Paperback

Zustand: Very Good

Auflage: First Edition.

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe:

Stanley Fish is one of America’s most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes a profound reexamination of some of criticism’s most basic assumptions. He penetrates to the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading formulations, and offers a stunning proposal for a new way of thinking about the way we read.

Fish begins by examining the relation between a reader and a text, arguing against the formalist belief that the text alone is the basic, knowable, neutral, and unchanging component of literary experience. But in arguing for the right of the reader to interpret and in effect create the literary work, he skillfully avoids the old trap of subjectivity. To claim that each reader essentially participates in the making of a poem or novel is not, he shows, an invitation to unchecked subjectivity and to the endless proliferation of competing interpretations. For each reader approaches a literary work not as an isolated individual but as part of a community of readers. “Indeed,” he writes, “it is interpretive communities, rather than either the text or reader, that produce meanings.”

The book is developmental, not static. Fish at all times reveals the evolutionary aspect of his work―the manner in which he has assumed new positions, altered them, and then moved on. Previously published essays are introduced by headnotes which relate them to the central notion of interpretive communities as it emerges in the final chapters. In the course of refining his theory, Fish includes rather than excludes the thinking of other critics and shows how often they agree with him, even when he and they may appear to be most dramatically at odds. Engaging, lucid, provocative, this book will immediately find its place among the seminal works of modern literary criticism.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor:

Stanley Fish is Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University. His many books include There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too.