Stanley Fish Reader

by Stanley Fish, H. Aram Veeser

Stanley Fish's critics disagree about him. He is an "intellectual boot-boy", a "trafficker in scurrility, effrontery, and every low rhetorical trick", "a happy gamesman" with a "disturbingly radical agenda". He is a jury-rigger, a dangerous populist, an open cynic and a self-declared sophist. And he is "the most quoted, most controversial, most in-demand and most feared English teacher in the world". The Stanley Fish Reader assembles for the first time the best work of this brightest intellectual light.

Essays spanning 30 years will attract anyone who has interests in Milton, the English Renaissance, law and literature, speech-act theory, Shakespeare, new pragmatism, first-amendment disputes, blind submission, rhetoric and anti-professionalism. This choice survey casts Fish's evolution into striking relief - what emerges is the transformation not of a personality but of a whole intellectual generation. The personality remains, of course, most riveting. As reported in the TLS, "Fish has made his living from qualities more typically associated with careers in sports or venture capital: agility, pugnacity, tenacity, opportunism, inventiveness, risk, flair". Edited and with an introduction by H. Aram Veeser, the Reader also provides headnotes written by specialists including Joan Bennett (Milton), Jonathan Goldberg (the New Historicism), Bruce Robbins (Professionalism), Stephen Moore (poststructuralism), Judith Roof (the law), Judith Butler (free speech), and many others.

Genres: Essays

311 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 1998

About the author

Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He is often associated with postmodernism, at times to his irritation, as he describes himself as an anti-foundationalist.

He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a Professor of Law at Florida International University, in Miami, as well as Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of 10 books. Professor Fish has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Duke University.