A breakthrough text from the '80s that changed literary criticism and teaching. Fish shifted the focus of authority from the text and/or the author (or the professor in the classroom) to the experience of the reader--as well as of readers in what he calls "interpretive communities."
"The Expediency of Culture" is a pioneering theorization of the changing role of culture in an increasingly global world. George Yudice explores how groups ranging from indigenous activists to nation-states to nongovernmental organizations have all come to see culture as a valuable resource to be invested in, contested, and used for varied ...
Theories and Narratives explores the relationship between social theory and historical writing. Its aim is to establish the contribution that theory can make to understanding the past. Pursuing this objective, Alex Callinicos critically confronts a number of leading attempts to reconceptualize the meaning of history, including Francis Fukuyama's ...
In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing - traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship - the terms 'liberal' and 'politically correct', are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as 'reactionary' and 'fascist' are by the left. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, ...
In this persuasive reversal of previous scholarship, Linda Schulte-Sasse takes an unorthodox look at Nazi cinema, examining Nazi films as movies that contain propaganda rather than as propaganda vehicles that happen to be movies. Like other Nazi artistic productions, Nazi film has long been regarded as kitsch rather than art, and therefore ...
What should be the role of our institutions of higher education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce responsible citizens? In Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues that, however laudable these goals might be, ...
While Stanley Fish has exerted immense influence on the study of seventeenth-century poetry and prose, his most widely read works -- and perhaps his most important -- are his nonliterary writings. In Justifying Belief, Gary Olson examines Fish's nonliterary work and explains that what unites Fish's interventions in so many seemingly disparate ...
Dance, whether considered as an art form or embodied social practice, as product or process, is a prime subject for cultural analysis. Yet only recently have studies of dance become concerned with the ideological, theoretical, and social meanings of dance practices, performances, and institutions. In "Meaning in Motion", Jane C. Desmond brings ...
Nelly Richard is one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America today. As a participant in Chile's neo-avantgarde, Richard worked to expand the possibilities for cultural debate within the constraints imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), and she has continued to offer incisive commentary about the country's ...
Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity - linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which ...
In this study of three of the most familiar texts in the Chinese tradition - all concerning stones endowed with magical properties - Jing Wang develops a reconstruction of ancient Chinese stone lore. Wang's comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insights into major topics in ...
This text was first published in the 1960s, in an era that no longer saw the need to choose between Milton's orthodoxy and heresy. Rather, Stanley Fish allowed us to see the epic poem as a self-revelatory experience in which the reader is "intangled" in the folds of Satan's rhetoric and is forced to re-evaluate his or her judgment of Satan by ...
The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity and its universalising processes. Approaching translation as a symbolic or material exchange among peoples and civilisations - and not as a purely linguistic or literary matter, the essays in "Tokens of Exchange" focus on China and its interactions with ...
The discipline of literary criticism is strictly defined, and the most pressing issues of the late 20th-century - racism, violence against women and homosexuals, cultural imperialism and the like - are located outside its domain. Stanley Fish raises a provocative challenge in this text to those who try to turn literary studies into an instrument ...
There's no neutral ground to stand on when making a claim, Fish argues in this book of political theory. He argues against the claims of liberals and conservatives alike who try to base their claims on what they say are neutral, transcendent principles. In fact, this book suggests, those principles are the very sorts of contingent and historically ...
The conditions for thinking about Latin America as a regional unit in trans-national academic discourse have shifted over the past decades. In The Exhaustion of Difference Alberto Moreiras ponders the ramifications of this shift and draws on deconstruction, post-Marxist theory, philosophy, political economy, subaltern studies, literary criticism, ...
In "Wedded to the Land?" Mary N. Layoun offers a critical commentary on the idea of nationalism in general and on specific attempts to formulate alternatives to the concept in particular. Narratives surrounding three geographically and temporally different national crises form the center of her study: Greek refugees' displacement from Asia Minor ...
This entertaining and playful book views Disney World as much more than the site of an ideal family vacation. Blending personal meditations, interviews, photographs, and cultural analysis, "Inside the Mouse" looks at Disney World's architecture and design, its consumer practices, and its use of Disney characters and themes. This book takes the ...
In "Dangerous Supplements" expert legal scholars employing a variety of theoretical perspectives--feminism, poststructuralism, semiotics, and Marxism--challenge predominating views in jurisprudence. Prevailing notions of the nature of the law, they argue, have failed to recognize the law's dependence on social constructs and the indeterminance of ...
In this book, Stanley Fish's critics disagree about him. He is an 'intellectual boot-boy', a 'trafficker in scurrility, effrontery, and every low rhetorical trick', 'a happy gamesman' with a 'disturbingly radical agenda'. He is a jury-rigger, a dangerous populist, an open cynic and a self-declared sophist. And he is 'the most quoted, most ...
Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through ...
"Utopia Limited" is an original, engaging account of how postmodernism emerged from the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Marianne DeKoven argues that aspects of sixties radical politics and culture simultaneously embodied the full, final flowering of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern. Analyzing classic 1960s texts, ...
In this volume the celebrated Milton critic regards Milton's entire body of work in terms of morality, presenting the embodiment of good as invulnerable to chaos and crisis.
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