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6 unusual facts about Stanley Fish


Changing Places

David Lodge has stated that the character of Morris Zapp was inspired by the literary critic Stanley Fish.

Conventionalism

One famous criticism of Dworkin's idea comes from Stanley Fish who opines that Dworkin, like the Critical Legal Studies movement, Marxists and adherents of feminist jurisprudence, was guilty of a false 'Theory Hope'.

Emerging church

Participants in the movement exhibit a particular concern for the effect of the modern reader's cultural context on the act of interpretation echoing the ideas of postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish.

Stanley Fish

In the latter piece, Fish argues that, if one has some answer in mind to the question "what is free speech good for?" along the lines of "in the free and open clash of viewpoints the truth can more readily be known," then it makes no sense to defend deliberate malicious libel (such as that which was at issue in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell) in the name of "free speech."

Offering an alternative, Nussbaum cites John Rawls's work in A Theory of Justice to highlight "an example of a rational argument; it can be said to yield, in a perfectly recognizable sense, ethical truth." Nussbaum appropriates Rawls's critique of the insufficiencies of Utilitarianism, showing that a rational person will consistently prefer a system of justice that acknowledges boundaries between separate persons rather than relying on the aggregation of the sum total of desires.

Writing in Slate Magazine, Judith Shulevitz reported that not only does Fish openly proclaim himself "unprincipled" but also rejects wholesale the concepts of "fairness, impartiality, reasonableness."


Literariness

Many of these scholars, which included Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, Umberto Eco to name a few, stated that literariness cannot be defined solely on the basis of linguistic properties found within a text but that the reader is also a crucial factor in the construction of meaning (Zwaan 1993, p. 8).


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