A list of names stayed on a blackboard between two classes. In the first class, it identified scholars the students were to read. In the second, it became the object of a close reading. Stanley Fish tells the story in How to Recognize a Poem When You See One, an essay collected in Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980). He uses it to ask what happens before a reader can point to a feature of a poem.
What happened in Fish’s classroom?
In the summer of 1971, Fish was teaching linguistics and a course on English religious poetry. Before the second class began, he drew a frame around the names on the board and put a page reference above them. He told the poetry students they were looking at a poem of the kind they had been studying. They set about reading it, looking for Christian symbols and patterns among the names.
Their observations drew on things they had learned to recognize in earlier poems. A name could call up a biblical figure and the arrangement of the words could become part of the reading. The linguistics class had no reason to pursue those relations. The writing on the board was much the same, but the students were doing different things with it from the moment they encountered it.
Why recognition comes first
We might assume that the students found poetic features and therefore decided that the list was a poem. Fish reverses the order. They approached the writing as poetry, so they knew which kinds of details might matter. The frame and the teacher’s instruction had force because the students already knew how to go about reading a religious poem.
This is where interpretive communities enter the argument. Shared practices help explain why several people can find a reading intelligible and why they can dispute particular details within it. A class learning to edit a bibliography would have reasons to notice different things. Neither group starts by facing the marks on the board without knowing what to do with them.
How it connects to Is There a Text in This Class?
In the title essay, a professor hears a question about a required book and later recognizes a question about literary theory. In the blackboard example, students see poetry where another class saw an assignment. Both episodes ask how people learn to recognize the kind of object or question they are dealing with. Once they do, some details become salient and some readings can be supported more readily than others.
Further reading · Stanley Fish’s Reader-Response Theory · Social Reader-Response Theory · Read Fish’s essay
