Is There A Text In This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
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Excerpt
Fish begins by examining the relation between a reader and a text, arguing against the formalist belief that the text alone is the basic, knowable, neutral, and unchanging component of literary experience. But in arguing for the right of the reader to interpret and in effect create the literary work, he skillfully avoids the old trap of subjectivity. To claim that each reader essentially participates in the making of a poem or novel is not, he shows, an invitation to unchecked subjectivity and to the endless proliferation of competing interpretations. For each reader approaches a literary work not as an isolated individual but as part of a community of readers. “Indeed,” he writes, “it is interpretive communities, rather than either the text or reader, that produce meanings.”
Description
viii, 394 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780674467262
Publication Date
1980
Publisher
Harvard University Press
City
Cambridge, Mass
Keywords
Literary Criticism, Facts and fictions, Demonstration vs. persuasion
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature
Recommended Citation
Fish, Stanley, "Is There A Text In This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities" (1980). Faculty Books. 30.
https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/faculty_books/30
Comments
Includes bibliographical references and index