| Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary & Legal Studies Contributor(s): Fish, Stanley (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822309955 ISBN-13: 9780822309956 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $35.10 Product Type: Paperback Published: August 1990 Annotation: "With six enormously influential and widely discussed books to his credit, Stanley Fish is perhaps the most quoted, most controversial, most in-demand, and most feared English teacher in the world, and one of the very best essayists in any field. . . . Beginning as, and remaining, a specialist in the literature of the English Renaissance up to Milton, Fish has transformed himself into a highly influential, widely discussed professor of law as well. And as his latest collection of essays, "Doing What Comes Naturally, "demonstrates, his interests are global, and include not only literature and law, but linguistics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, professionalism, and theoretically, any intellectual discourse whatsoever. . . . [A] masterful book."--Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Times Literary Supplement" "Of literary critics whose work comes to mind under the heading 'theory, ' Stanley Fish . . . has been preeminent as the orchestrator of a number of approaches to interpretation, chief among them reader-response criticism and deconstruction. . . . While no less rigorous than his earlier studies of Renaissance literature, "Doing What Comes Naturally" is a handy textbook for those who wish to catch up on the variety of questions to which literary criticism can usefully address itself today and to see a deconstructive method in action in various intellectual contexts, particularly in examining questions of literature and law."--Peter Meisel, "New York Times Book Review" |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory - Reference |
| Dewey: 801.95 |
| LCCN: 88026740 |
| Lexile Measure: 1600 |
| Series: Post-Contemporary Interventions |
| Physical Information: 1.49" H x 6.07" W x 9.24" (1.88 lbs) 624 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In Doing What Comes Naturally, Stanley Fish refuses the dilemma posed by this question and argues that while we can never separate our judgments from the contexts in which they are made, those judgments are nevertheless authoritative and even, in the only way that matters, objective. He thus rejects both the demand for an ahistorical foundation, and the conclusion that in the absence of such a foundation we reside in an indeterminate world. In a succession of provocative and wide-ranging chapters, Fish explores the implications of his position for our understanding of legal, literary, and psychoanalytic interpretation, the nature of professional and institutional culture, and the place of reason in a world that is rhetorical through and through. |