Volume 28, Number 20 · December 17, 1981
The Professor Knows
By Richard Wollheim
Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
by Stanley Fish
Harvard University Press, 394 pp., $17.50
Stanley Fish is a prominent professor of English who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University; he is a seventeenth-century scholar of distinction and a force among those literary critics who not merely assert but exercise the broader claims of their subject. In Is There a Text in This Class? he provides us with a decade's reflections on what literary criticism is and what literary works are. Thus Fish follows the general practice of contemporary literary criticism, which insists on the right both to determine the method it uses and to define the objects it investigates. In this way it resembles philosophy.
Review, 5437 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |