Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities

Fish provides an originally shocking, but now almost taken-for-granted, argument: there is no such thing as meaning sitting around in a book waiting to be mined like a physical object. Rather, everyone who comes to a book finds exactly what they were looking for in the first place. And the rules for what they find, and what is considered "acceptable" interpretation, comes not from some magic rule for all time but from particular groups of readers at particular times and places. Using Milton, Shakespeare, the students from his history as a literature professor at Johns Hopkins, and various other texts of all kinds, Fish makes a remarkable and witty argument for the stable but temporary interpretation of literature. There is no literature except what you call literature. So, the text doesn't tell you what it means. The reader doesn't decide what it means. The meaning in reading anything comes from the act of reading itself, shaped by the rules of the interpretive community.

I got this book from the footnotes of Nancey Murphy's "Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism" and various Stanley Hauerwas books. To the point, I had only read snippets of his writing. After seeing his work, I know that I still have a lot more learning to do. Looking forward to reading more of his stuff.

Rhetoric effaces who we Were, and from these spires and courts, Purges traces of our Jewy Uncles in Bermuda shorts.