(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Stanley Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar.
His views on how literature is interpreted and criticised evolved in public throughout his career, but even those that he partially repudiated are instructive in thinking about how we use books (Fish 1980, 1–17).
In 1970, he suggested that thinking in terms of what a text means as a whole—“sentence, page, work”—is to ignore the reader’s temporal experience of meaning (pp. 43–44). Our understanding of a text is incomplete if we attempt to describe what a text is rather than considering what the text does to us, moment by moment, while we’re reading. Instead of asking what a sentence means we should ask what it does. An implication is that the act of reading creates the text; its meaning can never be independent of the reader because meaning is an event that occurs in the process of a particular reading. The meaning will therefore shift as we progresses through the text, responding and predicting.
Yet he was subsequently careful to resist complete relativism by locating the production of meanings in the “interpretative community” of which the reader is a member (p. 171). This community is composed of norms and strategies with which texts are written (ibid.). The interpretive strategies of this community “give texts their shape” and provide acceptable approaches to reading them (p. 168). That is, the strategies make texts what they are rather than “arising from them” (ibid.).
This approach to interpretation will seem obvious to other members of the community, but not necessarily to members of others—it is the objective result of an agreement but subjective in that other parties may not be able to recognise it (pp. 15, 171). Further, the very “act of recognizing literature is not constrained by something in the text, nor does it issue from an independent and arbitrary will; rather, it proceeds from a collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers continues to abide by it” (p. 11).
Texts, on this view, change in different times and places. At the very least this should caution us against asserting that our interpretation is correct, despite it seeming obvious to us as a consequence of our membership in an interpretative community. The extent to which some of Fish’s ideas now seem like common sense, especially in certain academic circles, proves this point. It also suggests that by considering how other interpretative communities evaluate texts with which we’re familiar, we may, like Fish, be able to continue to expand our experiences of culture.