Stanley Fish Chapter Summary

Stanley Fish starts the chapter of his book with an anecdote, a story that he experienced within classes he taught at the New York State University. For his first class, Linguistics and Literary Criticisms, he had an assignment written on the board in his room, when that class left he then put a box around the assignment and labeled it “p. 43.” as the second class filed in, English Religious Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, he told them the assignment previously written was a poem. The students, in their interpretive community, started to interpret it in a way that “was more or less predictable” (Fish 324). The students of each class made up two interpretive communities, the first class made up the first, while the second class made up the other. The students that made up the

The students in this case have chosen a class that has taught them how to bring meaning to the works given to them. These students, for a number of weeks had been continuing to do the same things with other assignments, making it a reasonable argument that these students had become accustomed to performing in this manner and interpreted this assignment in this way because they trained themselves to do so. “Even so, one might reply, all you’ve done is demonstrate how an interpretation, if it is prosecuted with sufficient vigor, can impose itself on material which has its own proper shape… it is only a trick that allows you to transform it into a poem, and when the effects of the trick have worn off, it will return to its natural form and be seen as an assignment once again” (Fish 328-329). People argue with Fish, saying that the class only saw the text as a poem because Fish misled them, leading them believe what Fish had told them about the assignment. The students had no reason not to believe their professor so they believe and do as he says, making something out of