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“... years later. Although an increasing number of critics have turned their attention to him, a young Stanley Fish among them, one still had the feeling that the code had not been cracked, that he was a poet who had not yet found his critic. In the event, there has been no single great breakthrough: just a series of books and articles that have, little by ...”

“... we have, and so to leave critics like herself particularly vulnerable. Nobody would imagine that Stanley Fish was not up to his ears in capitalism, not least Stanley Fish; but there are a number of gullible souls in US graduate programmes who might just make the mistake of seeing Gayatri Spivak as some avatar of ...”

“... Hartman is not a theorist himself, not even a theorist malgré lui, but an advocate of theory. Stanley Fish is both advocate and theorist. The blurb to Is there a text in this class?† dubs him ‘one of America’s most stimulating literary theorists’: the advertisements have upped this to ‘one of the world’s most stimulating literary ...”

“... and Maxine Hong Kingston. Literature and history now worked exclusively ‘from below’. Stanley Hauerwas’s pronouncement that ‘the canon of great literature was created by high-Anglican assholes to underwrite their social class’ was paraded as a commandment of the PC movement. Hauerwas is a professor of theological ethics at Duke. Also cited ...”

“... that a fundamentalist may (paradoxically) be as much a ‘card-carrying anti-foundationalist’ as Stanley Fish. All of which suggests that the characteristically post-modern assumption that (to quote Fish) ‘questions of fact, truth, correctness, validity and clarity ... are intelligible and debatable only within the ...”

“... person will take for granted. To make matters worse, he uses favoured terminology inconsistently (Stanley Fish claimed to find 17 different meanings for the word ‘division’ in Bayley’s book The Uses of Division). Meanwhile, Bayley’s belief in the role of the critic as a judge is derided as antediluvian, and the scale of values by which he judges ...”

“... so that there already seems to be more theory than practice, which is, after all, the trend. As Stanley Fish remarks in a magisterial afterword to Veeser’s collection, most of these people are not doing New Historicism but only talking about doing it, often in prose that has taken on that self-important semi-illiteracy of which I have already ...”

“... the defeated peasant and the suffering Christ). The 13 remaining essays, whose authors include Stanley Fish, Louis Montrose, Stephen Orgel and Robert Weimann, concentrate on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. A number of these essays are concerned with representation in a fairly strict sense of the term – representations of the self, of gender, of ...”

“... or even nihilist in tendency. The villains in this book are Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, closely followed, as we shall see, by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The heroes are – well, Derrida, of course, but above all Noam Chomsky, here exalted especially ...”

“... control of his material crumbles a little as he covers the theory wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Stanley Fish is oddly linked to something called ‘pragmaticism’. But May does deliver the piquant information that the TLS was for a while so mistrusted by literary theorists that Martin Walker of the Guardian was dispatched in the hope of writing a ...”

“... paper on Divine, Gilbert and Gubar’s antiphonal lectures, the jab-and-parry pronouncements of Stanley Fish, Marge Garber’s study of transvestites, brought a humour and imagination to the lecture and essay from which Paglia profits, although these are among the rivals she most detests. Paglia is fun to read, especially in small doses. Her blasts at ...”

“... Since the publication of Must we mean what we say? in 1969, it has been said that Stanley Cavell’s books are unreviewable, a remark that will no doubt again be applied to his latest work. This remark has been repeated too often, by too many distinguished and distinctive philosophers, to be simply false, but neither should it be taken as flatly true ...”

“... article in the Wall Street Journal of 13 November 1990 reported the now notorious affaire in which Stanley Fish, Chairman of the English Department at Duke University and a major national power-broker of the theory trade, wrote to the Provost of the University demanding that local members of the National Association of Scholars should be banned from ...”

“... they are changeable. This view would seem to align Culler with the most recent work of Stanley Fish (only Fish’s earlier views are taken up by Culler here), who argues influentially in Is there a text in this class? that interpreters have no recourse to ‘independent evidence’ in disputes over ...”

“... the fact that texts mean what their author intend.’ This astonishing statement is echoed by Stanley Fish, who writes that the attack against theory ‘says nothing about what we can now do or not do, it is an account of what we have always been doing and cannot help but do’: that is to say, ‘act in accordance with the standards and norms that ...”