1 - Fish's strong conventions: the mind's own world

Summary

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

(Satan), Paradise Lost

Conventionism in literary critique

One of the more confusing aspects of the last four decades of critical and philosophical discourse has been the tendency for literary theory to get more epistemological just as philosophers were getting more literary. In the same decades in which Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Austin were relaxing their notion of philosophy's legitimacy, literary critics were trying to bolster theirs.

With the skepticism of post-structuralist excursions into the interpretive instabilities of the human sciences, however, a number of the more theoretically inclined critics soon suffered the same disillusionment and frustration that postmodern philosophers felt with the bolder claims of positivism, analytic philosophy, and ideal-language philosophy. It is not surprising, therefore, that postmodern philosophers and critics, sharing a skeptical sensibility, turn to similar strategies in their critiques of strong foundationist theories.

In particular, the later work of Stanley Fish illustrates an important and instructive turn from his earlier explorations of a number of current theoretical models (e.g. linguistics, stylistics, speech-act theory, reader-response theory) to a conventionist model of literary criticism. As a strong interpretivist, Fish characterizes his development as anti-foundational:

[Formerly] I wanted to put my accounts of the reader's experience on as firm a ground as the ground claimed by the champions of the text by identifying the real reading experience in relation to which others were deviations or distortions. […]