Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish believes there is no formal way for interpreting or deciphering a text. He says that readers don't read text, they write text. For example, when we read a poem, we are writing the poem ourselves by bringing our own interpretations and experiences to the poem. So what exactly does a writer do then? A writer issues an invitation to the reader to bring their rules and set of conventions to the text. We all live by unsaid rules of conventions. Think about it. When we go to a restaurant, we usually assume that we should be seated by a hostess, unless there is a sign. If someone seats themselves at a restaurant that they are supposed to wait for a hostess, people don't know what to do. This is an example of interprative community.

Fish introduces us to the term anti-foundationalism. Anti-foundationalism says that theory is just a description after the fact that we make sense of things, instead of actually applying the theory to everything else. We have theories and then we apply them to the text. But Fish believes that is not what is actually happening. He believes that our theory is just us describing what has happened. It does not have any consequences. There is a good article about anti-foundationalism at http://tinyurl.com/c3wx2h4.

This video really doesn't have much to do with this blog post but I wanted to include it becaues I really enjoyed Fish's speech about Liberal Arts.