Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, and the Professionalization of Literary Studies

2002 ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
Todd F. Davis ◽  
Kenneth Womack
Keyword(s):  
Literary Studies ◽  
Stanley Fish

Neopragmatism and the Question of Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Stanley Fish

Human Affairs ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Małecki
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Stanley Fish

Neopragmatism and the Question of Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Stanley FishThe aim of the paper is to criticize Stanley Fish's views on interdisciplinarity (particularly as far as his account of interdisciplinarity in literary studies is concerned). The first part of the article consists of: (a) a summary of his critique of the so-called religion of interdisciplinarity; (b) a description of Fish's theory of disciplinarity that underlies this critique. In the second part of the article, I provide a criticism of Fish's theory. I begin by presenting some counterexamples to it. Then I attempt to demonstrate that Fish's views are self-refuting. Finally, I argue that besides these theoretical reasons, there is also a practical reason why Fish's position needs to be questioned.

scholarly journals Literature as Conduct: On J. Hillis Miller’s Speech-act Theory and Its Application

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Rong Guo
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Paradigm Change ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Stanley Fish ◽  
Chinese Overseas ◽  
De Man ◽  
Wolfgang Iser

Since the publication of How to Do Things with Words in 1962, Austin and his speech-act theory caused a great disturbance in the arena of linguistics and literature, not only initiating the study of pragmatics but also triggering the paradigm change of literary studies in the 20th century. Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Derrida, de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and many other scholars in the 1970s showed great enthusiasm for theory. Yet, the theory’s limitations and applications are widely known. The publication of Speech Acts in Literature and Literature as Conduct by J. Hillis Miller seems to have given a kind of momentum to its development. Taking Miller’s initiatives as a starting point, this article analyzes a specific literary text, The Ninth Widow by a Chinese overseas writer Yan Geling, with an intention to illustrate that the application of the speech-act theory in the literary studies is indeed promising and productive.

“Reader Response” in the Nineties

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-206
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Reader Response ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Stanley Fish ◽  
University Level ◽  
Reader Response Criticism ◽  
Wolfgang Iser

What has come to be called reader-response criticism and theory was ascendant within literary studies in the 1970s and eighties but seems to have waned in the nineties. Edited collections such as Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman's The Reader in the Text and Jane Tompkins's Reader-Response Criticism, both published in 1980, continue to be important references and are still cited frequently. Comparable edited collections published in the nineties, though, such as James Machor's Readers in History (1993) and Andrew Bennett's Readers and Reading (1995) have not received the attention of the earlier collections, and most of the essays in Readers and Reading are reprints of articles published in the eighties. Individuals associated with the reader-response movement such as Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Wolfgang Iser continue to publish books, although these books do not necessarily focus on reading. The journal that I co-edit, Reader, which originated as a newsletter in 1976 as a result of an MLA session on reading that attracted hundreds of people, continues. It remains, though, one of a small number of journals devoted to reading and readers aimed at a university-level audience.

Against Stanley Fish on Ben Jonson and the Community of the Same

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-140
Author(s):  
William Everett Ramsay
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson ◽  
The People ◽  
Stanley Fish ◽  
Classic Essay

In his classic essay “Authors-Readers: Ben Jonson and the Community of the Same,” Stanley Fish argues, primarily on the basis of a series of close readings, that (1) Jonson's poetry of praise hints at a community in which everyone is the same; (2) Jonson's poetry of praise is nonrepresentational, while his poetry of blame is representational; (3) Jonson's poems of praise and the members of the community mentioned in them are largely interchangeable; and (4) Jonson writes nonrepresentational poetry of praise in which everyone is the same in order to maintain his independence in a patronage society. I argue that these four theses are false. Part I argues that Fish's equivocation on the crucial word identity and his misreading of “In Authorem” undermine his claim that there is a Jonson community in which everyone is the same. Part II argues that Fish's reading of Epigrams 63, “To Robert, Earl of Salisbury,” on which reading rests his claim that Jonson's poetry of praise is nonrepresentational, introduces several textual errors, and that, once these errors are corrected, the poem no longer supports that claim. Part III argues that an awareness of Jonson's poetic art, especially his use of puns, shows that his poems of praise are not interchangeable, while an attentiveness to the “signs of specificity” (38) in the poems of praise shows that the people discussed in them are not the same. Since the truth of the fourth thesis depends on the truth of the others, it is largely ignored.

Gilles Deleuze's Luminous Philosophy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanjo Berressem
Keyword(s):  
Projective Plane ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Real Projective Plane ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
The Real

Providing a comprehensive reading of Deleuzian philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy argues that this philosophy’s most consistent conceptual spine and figure of thought is its inherent luminism. When Deleuze notes in Cinema 1 that ‘the plane of immanence is entirely made up of light’, he ties this philosophical luminism directly to the notion of the complementarity of the photon in its aspects of both particle and wave. Engaging, in chronological order, the whole body and range of Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, the book traces the ‘line of light’ that runs through Deleuze’s work, and it considers the implications of Deleuze’s luminism for the fields of literary studies, historical studies, the visual arts and cinema studies. It contours Deleuze’s luminism both against recent studies that promote a ‘dark Deleuze’ and against the prevalent view that Deleuzian philosophy is a philosophy of difference. Instead, it argues, it is a philosophy of the complementarity of difference and diversity, considered as two reciprocally determining fields that are, in Deleuze’s view, formally distinct but ontologically one. The book, which is the companion volume toFélix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology, argues that the ‘real projective plane’ is the ‘surface of thought’ of Deleuze’s philosophical luminism.

Context Mediated

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-63
Author(s):  
Benjamin Pickford
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Economic Relation ◽  
Economic Agency

Benjamin Pickford, “Context Mediated: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Political Economy of Plagiarism” (pp. 35–63) Context has long been a critical determiner of methodologies for literary studies, granting scholars the tools to make objective claims about a text’s political or economic relation to the situation of its genesis. This essay argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson anticipatively criticizes our commitment to such practices through his use of plagiarism—a literary mode that exemplifies the denial of the sovereignty of context. I focus on two core principles that underlie Emerson’s conception of literature’s civic role in Essays: Second Series (1844): first, that literature is driven by an impulse to decontextualize; second, that this means that it has a deep affinity with the deterritorializing logic of capital. Provocatively proposing Emerson as a theorist of the relation between literature and economics, I argue that Essays: Second Series shows how the literary text can negotiate its ineluctable culpability with capitalism, but this does not mean that it can presume to possess a privileged point of vantage that might deny such culpability. Given that this is precisely what much historicizing or contextualizing scholarship implies, I contend that Emerson gives us a case study in the limits of literature and criticism’s economic agency.

L.I. Strakhovsky: Between Symbolism and Acmeism (Based on Foreign Publications)

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-437
Author(s):  
Nikolay N. Nosov
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Usual Sense ◽  
Creative Evolution ◽  
Russian State ◽  
Library Resources ◽  
Individual Features ◽  
State Library

The article is devoted to L.I. Strakhovsky (alias Leonid Chatsky; 1898—1963), a Russian writer and poet of the first wave of emigration, and his poetry and prose reflected in foreign publications of his works in Russian. Returning to our culture the name of this author, now half-forgotten in his homeland, and introducing this name into literary studies, the article tries to reveal the thematic and stylistic diversity of L.I. Strakhovsky’s poetry and prose. The research’s object is foreign publications of L.I. Strakhovsky’s artistic works in separate books, almanacs and periodicals published in Belgium, Germany, Canada and identified through collection catalogues of leading Russian libraries (the Russian State library, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russia Abroad) and library resources that display foreign Russian-language publications by L.I. Strakhovsky. The article highlights and analyzes the main stylistic (symbolism, acmeism, “junior acmeism”) and thematic (autobiographical, English, mystical) components of L.I. Strakhovsky’s works, reveals the components’ individual features, the originality of their constancy and mutual influence. The main of these features is that L.I. Strakhovsky’s works can be stylistically periodized on the basis of the author’s increased propensity to cyclize his works though without creative evolution in the usual sense and with the stable nature of his working throughout his life. To review the publications and analyze the nature of L.I. Strakhovsky’s works, the article draws on the context of Russian and emigrant literature of his era, creatively associated with L.I. Strakhovsky and its main figures, and notes his literary and cultural influence.

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