Stanley Fish's "Is
There a Text in This Class?" is a classic account on the nature of
linguistic utterance and the scope of possible interpretation. Fish builds his
article on an anecdote in which a student approaches a professor on the first
day of the semester asking "is there a text in this class?". The
professor thinks she is asking about reading materials but soon learns that the
student is actually asking about the statues of the text in his class, in her
words: "In this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it just
us?". The professor learns that the student previously took a class with
Fish, turning her to "one of his victims" in suggesting that the interpretation
of a text is open and indeterminate. Fish turns this dialogue on itself in
order to talk about the possibility of a definite interpretation and the relativistic
dangers of reader based subjectivity.
Although he does not
quote him, Fish corresponds to Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" where he
argued that the reader, not the writer, as the authority over the interpretation
of the text. Two more influences on Fish's "Is There a Text in This Class?"
is Reader Response Criticism and the deconstructionist philosophy of Jacques
Derrida. Fish addresses the criticism levied against the idea of the reader
being the locus of interpretation and not the text itself.
Fish wonders if not
having one fixed literal meaning of a text actually means that there are "meanings
as there are readers"?. He comes back to the "is there a text in this
class?" anecdote to show how one utterance can be interpreted in two
different ways depending on different assumptions. Both these meanings are not indeterminate or none-normative,
they are just determined in different manners and under different norms
depending on how the interpreter understands the situation.
Fish argues that the
two possible meanings of the utterance "is there a text in this
class?" are already conditioned by the situation in which it was uttered -
the first day of class. This prior knowledge is not in fact prior nor later since
it is activated at one and the same time with the reception of the utterance
and its interpretation. Fish holds the meaning is always constrained "not
after it was heard but in the ways in which it could, in the first place,
be heard". This assertion by Fish echoes with Wittgenstein's famous "the meaning of a word is its use in the
language" (in Philosophical Investigations).
See also: Fish's concept of Interpretive Communities
See also: Fish's concept of Interpretive Communities
A Comparative Analysis of Stanley Fish and Roland Barthes
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