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Interview

Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, and public intellectual. Scott Parker asks him about a particular kind of community.

You’re known for your notion of ‘interpretive communities’. What are they?

The idea of interpretive communities was introduced in order to bypass and outflank a traditional question in literary interpretation. That question was, where does meaning reside? Does it reside in the text, or does it reside in the reader? People had been debating those two answers for a long time. I pointed out that neither the text nor the reader had an independent status that would make the question intelligible. Each would have to be a separate freestanding unit competing with the other for the claim of producing meaning.

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