Re: Bananastanley Fish


Subject: Re: Bananastanley Fish
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Date: Sat Feb 19 2000 - 21:05:23 EST


In a message dated 2/19/00 8:30:01 PM Eastern Standard Time,
mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu writes:

<< "It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain
 kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention
 results in the emergence of poetic qualities. As soon as my students
 were aware that it was poetry they were seeing, they began to look
 with poetry-seeing eyes that saw everything in relation to the
 properties they knew poems to possess..." >>

I've finally read Fish's Is There A Text In This Class and I have quite a few
problems with some of his assertions.

The biggest problem is that they're blind.

He won't even CONSIDER that the SAME societal matrix -- and he does
acknowledge the existence of a societal matrix that creates readings, thus
meaning is stable within a specific context -- influences authors as much as
it does readers. The same "poetry seeing eyes" create poetry as well as read
it, and this brings back in through the Back Door a kind of objective
criteria for poetry.

Reading strategies and writing strategies are the same. The author is
important because he is the first reader, not because he is the origin. The
meaning of a text is found in the space it occupies between author and
audience. Once we define the audience, we've defined the text.

What I would argue for theoretically is something of a cross between Fish's
Reader Response and a historicist approach. Fish almost argues for that
himself, but doesn't want to see it. As a result, he's too sloppy and self
absorbed to be a trustworthy critic. He has the BALLS to call
neo-conservative scholars racists because they ignore history in _There's No
Such Thing As Free Speech_, and has the BALLS to do a reading of Milton's
Areopagitica that TOTALLY ignores historical referents in its interpretation
of the text, and by so doing actually asserts the exact opposite about
Milton's intent that a straightfoward reading would leave you with (and I
know the text is problematic).

So just don't go quoting Fish around me, buddy :) I'll post a whole freaking
essay that reams Fish one just for the sake of annoying everyone :)

Jim
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