Vol. 15 No. 11 · 10 June 1993
pages 11-16 | 9204 words
Why Literary Criticism is like Virtue
Stanley Fish
There is a great difference between trying to figure out what a poem means and trying to figure out which interpretation of a poem will contribute to the toppling of patriarchy or to the war effort. Until recently the assertion of this difference would have been superfluous, but in many circles it has come to be an article of faith that the idea of a distinctively literary system of facts and values is at best an illusion and at worst an imposition by the powers that be of an orthodoxy designed to suppress dissent. It is thought to be an illusion for the reason that both the form and the content of a discourse are not self-generated, but have the shape they do by virtue of relationships (of similarity and difference) with other discourses that are themselves relationally, not essentially, constituted. If literature, under some definitions, occupies (has title to) the realm of the ‘imagination’ it is because other enterprises – law, sociology, chemistry and engineering would be interestingly different candidates – find their self-definition (and their methodologies) in a renunciation (not a negative, but an enabling gesture) of that realm; and each of these enterprises will in turn gain a franchise by pushing away as beside its point responsibilities and concerns that ‘belong’ elsewhere.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 13 · 8 July 1993
From Terence Hawkes
Loved Stanley Fish’s notion that the work of academics can’t be transformed into the currency of politics (LRB, 10 June). I promise not to mention the likes of Norman Holmes Pearson, professor of English at Yale and one-time head of X-2, the counter-intelligence branch of the American OSS (later the CIA). Or Sir John Masterman, eminent Oxford historian and developer of the ‘double cross system’ for the exploitation of enemy spies. But even if it’s time to come in from the cold, the position which urges that literary criticism has no access to, or influence on, the world of politics might strike some people as itself pretty political. Are you sure Fish isn’t a double agent?
Terence Hawkes
University of Wales, Cardiff
From R. Davies
Stanley Fish’s essay exploits many metaphors from the world of commerce: ‘enterprise’, ‘have title to’, ‘franchise’, ‘our shop’, ‘site of production’, ‘trade’, ‘traffic’, ‘fungible currency’, ‘borrow’, ‘appropriate’, ‘invest’, ‘buy’ and so on. There are two points in his accounting to which he might (profitably?) attend. One is that the reward of the virtue which is Stanley Fish’s literary criticism accrues principally to Stanley Fish. The balance sheet to be drawn up, however, concerns the profits and losses to people other than Stanley Fish as a result of his cultivating his virtue. How does this add up?
The other concerns his description of the ‘alternative market’ in which some philosophers now find themselves: that of medical ethics. In noting quite properly the fact that ethical theory does not make up for ethical knowledge, Stanley Fish indicates that he supposes that an ‘ethicist’ thinks up problem situations ‘so that he can amaze his students with his subtlety’. But students – at least those fit enough to attend lectures – are not the intended consumers of the commodity on offer. Does Stanley Fish write about Milton to amaze his students with his subtlety?
R. Davies
University of Bergamo
From Dennis Newson
Amongst my pleasures are reading and sex. I refuse to let Stanley Fish put me off poetry, but thank goodness he doesn’t write sexual as well as literary criticism.
Dennis Newson
University of Osnabrück
