Professional Correctness by Stanley Fish

Product Details

Synopsis

The discipline of literary criticism is strictly defined, and the most pressing issues of our time--racism, violence against women and homosexuals, cultural imperialism, and the like--are located outside its domain. In Professional Correctness, Stanley Fish raises a provocative challenge to those who try to turn literary studies into an instrument of political change, arguing that when literary critics try to influence society at large by addressing social and political issues, they cease to be literary critics at all. Anyone interested in the debate over the place of cultural studies in the field of literary criticism, or the more general question of whether academics can become the "public intellectuals" many aspire to be, needs to read Fish's powerful and unconventional argument for restoring discipline to the academy.

Annotation

As a founder of Reader Response Theory, critic to what he calls free speech ideology, Fish has become an icon to a new generation of leftist literary critics. Ironically, in this book, the author makes a case that politics and literary studies don't mix, and criticizes both liberals and conservatives.

Library Journal

Literature should be read as literature by literary scholars, contends the controversial academic Fish (There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, LJ 10/1/93). Looking back to his earlier work in reader response theory, Fish argues that the assumptions a reader brings to a text defines the work and how it is read. That being the case, critics should not abdicate the assumptions that distinguish them as critics, not as historians or politicians. While supporting a diversity of texts and approaches, Fish challenges the projects of various political and cultural critics, as well as New Historicists, for advancing the wrong questions and conceiving the wrong object, thereby closing off the profession. The goal of literary studies is literature, not a larger political agenda. Fish offers a lucid and stimulating contribution to the debate over literary studies from the liberal side of the spectrum. For academic collections.-T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.

Biography

Stanley Fish is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His many books include There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too.