Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish (born April 19, 1938, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.) is an American literary critic particularly associated with reader-response criticism, according to which the meaning of a text is created, rather than discovered, by the reader; with neopragmatism, where critical practice is advanced over theory; and with the interpretive relationships between literature and law.

Fish was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1959) and Yale University (M.A., 1960; Ph.D., 1962). He taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Florida International University in Miami.

In Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost” (1967), Fish suggested that the subject of John Milton’s masterpiece is in fact the reader, who is forced to undergo spiritual self-examination when led by Milton down the path taken by Adam and Eve and Satan. In Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980), Fish further developed his reader-as-subject theory. The essays in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989) discuss a number of aspects of literary theory. Fish’s subsequent works included There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too (1994), Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995), The Trouble with Principle (1999), and How Milton Works (2001). How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One and Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn’t Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom were published in 2011 and 2016, respectively.