Reference:
Review Excerpts 'This equivocation allowed me to retain the text as a stable entity at
the same time that I was dislodging it as the privileged container of
meaning' (3).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | text | privileged |
meaning |
'The reader's response is not to the meaning; it is the meaning, or
at least the medium in which what I wanted to call the meaning comes
into being' (3).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | meaning |
medium |
The sentence 'is no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event,
something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader. And
it is this event, this happening -- all of it and not anything that could be
said about it or any information one might take away from it -- that is, I
would argue, the meaning of the sentence' (25).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | event | meaning |
reader |
sentence |
thing-in-itself |
The sentence 'is an experience; it occurs, it does something; it
makes us do something.... what it does is what is means....there is no
direct relationship between the meaning of a sentence (paragraph, novel,
poem) and what its words mean....It is the experience of an utterance...
that is its meaning. It follows, then, that it is impossible to mean the same
thing in two (or more) different ways, although we tend to think that it
happens all the time' (32).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | meaning |
sentence |
utterance |
'To consider the utterances apart from the consciousness receiving
it is to risk missing a great deal of what is going on' (36).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | 'The method, then, is applicable to larger units and its chief
characteristics remain the same: (1) it refuses to answer or even ask the
question, what is this work about; (2) it yields an analysis not of formal
features but of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the
words as they succeed one another in time; (3) the result will be a
description of the structure of response which hay have an oblique or
even ... a contrasting relationship to the structure of the work as a thing in
itself' (42).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | analysis |
description |
method |
reader |
relation |
result |
structure |
'I would rather have an acknowledged and controlled subjectivity
than an objectivity which is finally an illusion' (49).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | subjectivity |
'Meaning is a (partial) product of the utterance-object, but not to be
identified with it' (65).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | meaning |
'The meaning of an utterance, I repeat, is its experience -- all of it --
and that experience is immediately compromised the moment you say
something about it. It follows then that we should not try to analyze
language at all. The human mind, however, seems unable to resist the
impulse to investigate its own processes; but the least (and probably the
most) we can do is proceed in such a way as to permit as little distortion
as possible' (65-6).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | language |
meaning |
mind |
utterance |
'Becoming good at the method means asking the question "what
does that ------ do?" with more and more awareness of the probable (and
hidden) complexity of the answer, that is, with a mind more and more
sensitized to the workings of language. In a peculiar and unsettling (to
theorists) way, it is a method which processes its own user, who is also
its only instrument. It is self-sharpening and what it sharpens is you. It
does not organize materials, but transforms minds' (66).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | language |
method |
mind |
().
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | Good analysts will be able 'to see the value of considering effects
and ... to think of language as an experience rather than as a repository
of extractable meaning' (67).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | language |
meaning |
value |
'The linguist says, I have done the job of describing the language;
you take it from here. The critic replies, I have no use for what you have
done; you've given me at once too little and too much. Superficially, then,
the two positions are firmly opposed, but only slightly beneath the surface
one finds a crucial area of agreement: in their concern to characterize
the properties of literary language, Schwartz [a critic] and Saporta [a
linguist] simply assume a characterization of nonliterary or ordinary
language, and that characterization is also a judgment' (99).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | agreement |
judgment |
language |
literary |
nonliterary |
'Linguistics is positively harmful when its procedures are applied to
such utterances, and it had best limit itself to the sphere of its
competence, which is, of course, ordinary language' (100).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | competence |
language |
linguistics |
'By accepting the positivist assumption that ordinary language is
available to a purely formal description, both sides assure that their
investigations of literary language will be fruitless and arid; for if one
begins with an impoverished notion of ordinary language, something that
is then defined as a deviation from ordinary language will be doubly
impoverished. Indeed, it is my contention that the very act of
distinguishing between ordinary and literary language, because of what it
assumes, leads necessarily to an inadequate account of both'
(101).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | assumption |
contention |
description |
deviation |
language |
literary |
notion |
'The trivialization of ordinary language is accomplished as soon as
one excludes from its precincts matters of purpose, value, intention,
obligation, and so on -- everything that can be characterized as human.
What, then, is left to it? The answers to this question are various. For
some, the defining constituent of ordinary language, or language, is its
capacity to carry messages; for others, the structure of language is more
or less equated with the structure of logic ... Still others hold instrumental
views: language is used to refer either to objects in the real world or to
ideas in the mind ... But whatever the definition, two things remain
constant: (1) the content of language is an entity that can be specified
independently of human values... and (2) a need is therefore created for
another entity or system in the context of which human values can claim
pride of place.... Once you've taken the human values out of the
language, and yet designated what remains as the norm, the separated
values become valueless, because they have been removed from the
normative center' (101-2).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | claim | constituent |
content |
context |
definition |
intention |
language |
logic |
mind |
norm |
purpose |
structure |
system |
value |
world |
'My intention is not to criticize the work of the men, but to point out
the extent to which the decision to separate ordinary and literary
language dictates the shape of other decisions even before there is any
pressure to make them' (103).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | intention |
language |
literary |
'Here again we see the moral force of the norm of ordinary
language, its inevitable legislation of the ideal of logical clarity, even in
context which are defined in opposition to that ideal' (104).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | clarity | context |
language |
norm |
'When Roman Jakobson declares that the chief task of literary
theory is to discover "what makes a verbal message a work of art",
whether he knows it or not he has delivered himself of an answer
masquerading as a question. What makes a verbal message a work of
art? Whatever it is, it will presumably not be what makes it a verbal
message' (105-6).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | literary | theory |
verbal |
'There is no such thing as ordinary language' (106).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | language |
'Philosophical, psychological, and moral concepts ... are built into
the language we use... The significance of this is that the language
system is not characterized apart for the realm of value and intention but
begins and ends with that realm' (107).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | intention |
language |
significance |
system |
value |
'Description of that language will be inseparable from a description
of ... commitments and obligations' (107-8).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | description |
language |
'What philosophical semantics and the philosophy of speech acts
are telling us is that ordinary language is extraordinary because at its
heart is precisely that realm of values, intentions, and purposes which is
often assumed to be the exclusive property of literature' (108).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | language |
philosophy |
'If deviation theories trivialize the norm and therefore trivialize
everything else, a theory which restores human content to language also
restores legitimate status to literature by reuniting it with a norm that is no
longer trivialized' (108).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | content |
deviation |
language |
norm |
status |
theory |
'Literary language may be the norm, and message-bearing
language a device we carve out to perform the special, but certainly not
normative, task of imparting information' (109).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | language |
literary |
norm |
'All aesthetics, then, are local and conventional rather than universal,
reflecting a collective decision as to what will count as literature, a
decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or
believers ... continues to abide by it' (109).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | collective |
community |
universal |
'The search for style, like the search for an essentialist definition of
literature, proceeds in the context of an assumption that predetermines
its shape' (110).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | assumption |
context |
definition |
essentialist |
style |
'The attempt to specify once and for all the properties of literature
and locate the boundaries of style should be either abandoned ... or
recognized for what it is: not a disinterested investigation but the
reflection of an ideology; not a progress toward a theory but the product
of one; not a question but an answer' (111).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | ideology |
investigation |
style |
theory |
'The fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of
objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to
constitute the objects upon which its members ... can then agree....
Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which
the facts are settled. Of course, no such settling is final, and in the
(almost certain) event that the dispute is opened again, the category of
the facts "as they really are" will be reconstituted in still another shape.
Nowhere is this process more conveniently on display than in literary
criticism, where everyone's claim is that his interpretation more perfectly
accords with the facts, but where everyone's purpose is to persuade the
rest of us to the version of the facts he espouses by persuading us to the
interpretive principles in the light of which those facts will seem
indisputable' (338-9).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | agreement |
category |
claim |
community |
criticism |
event |
interpretation |
literary |
power |
principles |
purpose |
Remarking on Raine's and Hirsch's use of the word forest from
Blake's The Tyger to defend opposing interpretations, Fish says that
'what we have here than are two critics with opposing interpretations,
each of whom claims the same word as internal and confirming
evidence. Clearly they cannot both be right, but just as clearly there is no
basis for deciding between them. One cannot appeal to the text,
because the text has become an extension of the interpretive
disagreement that divides them' (340).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | basis | evidence |
text |
word |
'Whenever a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like "without
doubt" or "there can be no doubt", you can be sure that you are within
hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that
he presents as obvious.... As one obvious and indisputable
interpretation supplants another, it brings with it a new set of obvious and
indisputable facts. Of course each new reading is elaborated in the
name of the poem itself, but the poem itself is always a function of the
interpretive perspective from which the critic "discovers" it'
(341).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | function |
interpretation |
name |
perspective |
phrase |
principles |
reading |
'While "The Tyger" is obviously open to more than one interpretation,
it is not open to an infinite number of interpretations' (341).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | interpretation |
'A pluralist is committed to saying that there is something in the text
which rules out some readings and allows others ... His best evidence is
that in practice "we all in fact" do reject unacceptable readings and that
more often than not we agree on the readings that are to be
rejected....but if, as I have argued, the text is always a function of
interpretation, then the text cannot be the location of the core of
agreement by means of which we reject interpretations' (342).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | agreement |
evidence |
function |
interpretation |
text |
'While there is no core of agreement in the text, there is a core of
agreement ... concerning the ways of producing the text. Nowhere is this
set of acceptable ways written down, but it is a part of everyone's
knowledge of what it means to be operating within the literary institution
as it is now constituted.... This does not mean that these rules and the
practices they authorize are either monolithic or stable' (342-3).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | agreement |
knowledge |
literary |
text |
A given interpretation will be unacceptable, Fish says, if 'there is at
present no interpretive strategy for producing it.... [Thus,] while there are
always mechanisms for ruling out readings, their source is not the text
but the presently recognized interpretive strategies for producing the
text' (346-7).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | interpretation |
source |
strategy |
text |
'The discovery of the "real point" is always what is claimed
whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense
only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered
the real one. This means that the space in which a critic works has been
marked out for him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by
the conventions of the institution to dislodge them.... it is only because
something has already been said that he can now say something
different' (350).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | claim | discovery |
interpretation |
relation |
'It is assumed that the truth about a work will be what penetrates to
the essence of its literary value' (351).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | literary | truth |
value |
'The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of
simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of
interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for
itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all' (353).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | claim | interpretation |
principles |
text |
'Strictly speaking, getting "back-to-the-text" is not a move one can
perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by
some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its
production. This is not to say, however, that the "back-to-the-text" move
is ineffectual, The fact that it is not something one can do in no way
diminishes the effectiveness of claiming to do it. As a rhetorical ploy, the
announcement that one is returning to the text will be powerful so long as
the assumption that criticism is secondary to the text and must not be
allowed to overwhelm it remains unchallenged.... A wholesale challenge
would be impossible because there would be no terms in which it could
be made; that is, in order to be wholesale, it would have to be made in
terms wholly outside the institution; but if that were the case, it would be
unintelligible because it is only within the institution that the facts of
literary study -- texts, authors, periods, genres -- become available'
(354-5).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | assumption |
case |
criticism |
interpretation |
literary |
study |
text |
'So it would seem, finally, that there are no moves that are not
moves in the game, and this includes ever the move by which one claims
no longer to be a player.... What I have been saying is that whatever they
do, it will only be interpretation in another guise because, like it or not
interpretation is the only game in town' (355).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | interpretation |
'My colleague was not hesitating between two (or more) possible
meanings of the utterance; rather, he immediately apprehended what
seemed to be an inescapable meaning, given his prestructured
understanding of the situation, and then he immediately apprehended
another inescapable meaning when that understanding was altered'
(525-6).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | meaning |
situation |
understanding |
utterance |
'Norms are not imbedded in the language ... but inhere in an
institutional structure within which one hears utterances as already
organized with reference to certain assumed purposes and goals'
(526).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | language |
reference |
structure |
'The meaning of the utterance would be severely constrained, not
after it was heard but in the ways in which it could, in the first place, be
heard. An infinite plurality of meanings would be a fear only if sentences
existed in a state in which they were not already embedded in and had
come into view as a function of, some situation or other' (526).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | embedded |
function |
meaning |
situation |
state |
utterance |
Speaking of the need to declare the more common interpretation of
the reference of an utterance as its normal meaning, Fish says 'To admit
as much is not to weaken my argument by reinstating the category of the
normal, because the category as it appears in that argument is not
transcendental but institutional; and while no institution is so universally in
force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables will be normal for
ever, some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a
great many people the meanings the enable seem "naturally" available
and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of
circumstances....The obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a
function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is
independent of context; rather, it is because the words are heard as
already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can
then cite as obvious.... it is impossible even to think of a sentence
independently of a context, and when we are asked to consider a
sentence for which no context has been specified, we will automatically
hear it in the context in which it has been most often encountered'
(527).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | argument |
category |
context |
embedded |
function |
interpretation |
meaning |
reference |
sentence |
system |
utterance |
No one ' is free to confer on an utterance any meaning he likes.
Indeed, "confer" is exactly the wrong word because it implies a two stage
procedure in which a reader or hearer first scrutinizes an utterance and
then gives it a meaning. The argument of the preceding pages can be
reduced to the assertion that there is no such first stage, that one hears
an utterance within, and not as preliminary to determining, a knowledge
of its purposes and concerns, and that to so hear it is already to have
assigned it a shape and given it a meaning' (528).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | argument |
hearer |
knowledge |
meaning |
reader |
utterance |
word |
Speaking of a colleague's figuring out a puzzling reference by one
of Fish's students, Fish remarks that 'by a route that is neither entirely
unmarked nor wholly determined, he comes to me and to the notion "one
of Fish's victims" and to a new construing of what his student has been
saying' (529).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | notion | reference |
'The point of my analysis has been to show that while "Is there a text
in this class?" does not have a determinate meaning, a meaning that
survives the sea change of situations, in any situation we might imagine
the meaning of the utterance is either perfectly clear or capable, in the
course of time, of being clarified. What is it that makes this possible, if it
is not the "possibilities and norms" already encoded in the language?
How does communication ever occur if not by reference to a public and
stable norm? The answer, implicit in everything I have already said, is
that communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation
is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of
assumptions, of practices understood to be relevant in relation to
purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the
assumption of these purposes and goals that any utterance is
immediately heard.... What I have been arguing is that meanings come
already calculated, not because of norms embedded in the language but
because language is always perceived, from the very first, within a
structure of norms. That structure, however, is not abstract and
independent but social; and there fore it is not a single structure with a
privileged relationship to the process of communication as it occurs in
any situation but a structure that changes when one situation, with its
assumed background of practices, purposes, and goals, has given way
to another' (531).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract |
analysis |
assumption |
communication |
embedded |
implicit |
language |
meaning |
norm |
privileged |
reference |
relation |
situation |
structure |
text |
utterance |
'On one level this counterargument is unassailable, but on another
level it is finally beside the point. It is unassailable as a general and
theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institution-specific
norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm whose validity would be
recognized by everyone, no matter what his situation. But it is beside the
point for any particular individual, for since everyone is situated
somewhere, there is no one for whom the absence of an asituational
norm would be of any practical consequence, in the sense that his
performance or his confidence in his ability to perform would be
impaired. So that while it is generally true that to have many standards is
to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular ... In other words,
while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one
can occupy.... The point is that there is never a moment when one
believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all
categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative
at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground' (532).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | asituational |
conclusion |
consequence |
counterargument |
ground |
level |
norm |
situation |
thought |
validity |
Last Modified:
July-12-96 8:57:38
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