It is not the linguistic system that gives determinacy to the meaning of an utterance but rather the context of the utterance. Abrams and E. Hirsch imply, first scrutinize an utterance and then give it meaning ITC, We hear an utterance as already embedded within, not prior to determining, a knowledge of its purposes and interests ITC, Fish is effectively applying a wellknown and previously extensively articulated insight to the act of reading.
The same applies to his claim that facts do not exist independently of, or prior to, the interpretations and viewpoints that construct them as such. The problem here, as Fish effectively acknowledges, is that the text disappears. Whereas for the formalists the text was a stable object, for Fish there is nothing beyond intersubjective agreement, and the text is reduced to merely the area of overlap of subjective responses.
Fish employs a naive notion of objectivity as somehow entirely independent of subjectivity. Shakespeare in the Bush interpretive communities no meaning"inherent" in the text "There is simply the conviction that the facts exist in their own self-evident shape and that disagreements are to be resolved by referring the respective parties to the facts as they really are. In the view that I have been urging, however, disagreements cannot be resolved by reference to the facts, because the facts emerge only in the context of some point of view.
Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled" issue with literary criticism Raine - tyger is evil? Hirsch - holiness of the Tyger " If Raine had not already decided that the answer to the poem's final question is "beyond all possible doubt, No," the cabbalistic texts, with their distinction between supreme and inferior deities, would never have suggested themselves to her as Blake's source.
The rhetoric of critical argument, as it is usually conducted in our journals, depends upon a distinction between interpretations on the one hand and the textual and contextual facts that will either support or disconfirm them on the other; but as the example of Blake's "Tyger" shows, text, context, and interpretation all emerge together, as a consequence of a gesture the declaration of belief that is irreducibly interpretive.
If they were, they would not attempt to answer its questions. It would be my answer too; but the real question is what gives us the right so to be right.
We seem to be at an impasse: on the one hand there would seem to be no basis for labeling an interpretation unacceptable, but on the other we do it all the time. The professor learns that the student previously took a class with Fish, turning her to "one of his victims" in suggesting that the interpretation of a text is open and indeterminate.
Fish turns this dialogue on itself in order to talk about the possibility of a definite interpretation and the relativistic dangers of reader based subjectivity. Although he does not quote him, Fish corresponds to Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" where he argued that the reader, not the writer, as the authority over the interpretation of the text. Fish addresses the criticism levied against the idea of the reader being the locus of interpretation and not the text itself.
Fish wonders if not having one fixed literal meaning of a text actually means that there are "meanings as there are readers"?.
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