Stanley Fish Argument

When students are given a work of literature, their immediate reaction is to analyze it, and discover its “deeper meaning”. This is problematic, in that there is not one universal meaning. It is a debate among the critics and scholars of language and literature what, and who, gives a poem meaning. Stanley Fish claims that meaning comes from the interpretive community. A prominent literary theorist, he compared the act of interpretation to following a recipe. Fish claims that readers are instructed to look at texts in ways that will produce what they expect to see. This analysis does not support the suggestion that the individual reader gives the text meaning. Cleanth Brooks, an influential literary critic, does not refute Fish’s idea, but Brooks
This means that Brooks is concerned is concerned with formalism. Critics such as Brooks are only concerned with the text itself; they take the content of the text and think of it as form. Indeed, Brooks’ aforementioned article is titled “The Formalist Critics”. In this article, he discusses the importance of removing the author from the text, so that the text can be the primary focus of the criticism. Already, Brooks is paving the way for the importance of the individual reader to be recognized. Brooks points out that to sever the work from those who actually read it is disastrous (247). In response to Fish, Brooks states that, “works are merely potential until they are read- that is, that they are re-created in the minds of actual readers, who vary enormously in their capabilities, their interests, their prejudices, their ideas” (247). This supports Fish’s theory that objects are made, and not found. Texts are all possibilities until someone gives them meaning, rather than discovers their meaning. The area of contention for Brooks seems to be who it is that gives the text its potential. Brooks does not mention an interpretive community. His quote above refers to readers in the plural, each of which is his or her own person with his or her own ideas. Now Fish would argue that each of these individuals’ ideas was influenced from their own interpretive community. He is not entirely wrong. However, this would mean that
Of course not. Would they all analyze it in the in which they were taught to analyze poetry? Most likely, yes. But what if they were never told it was a poem? What if you could gather a group of people who had never seen or heard of poetry? Then there would be no prior knowledge from an interpretive community for those individuals. They would look at the poem as a million different things: a series of words, a visual description of a scene, a man truly contemplating what a red wheelbarrow means. Fish’s experiment was done only with students at a university, who all came into the class with the same basis of understanding.