Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Clarendon Lectures in English) - Hardcover

Fish, Stanley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198123736 ISBN 13: 9780198123736

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Few literary scholars have won the fame--or notoriety--achieved by Stanley Fish. As a founder of Reader Response Theory, critic of what he calls free speech ideology, and activist chair of the English Department at Duke University, he has become an icon to a new generation of leftist literary critics--and a demon to right-wing opponents of "tenured radicals," as Roger Kimball called them. How ironic, then, that Fish now makes a powerful case that politics and literary studies don't mix.
In Professional Correctness, Stanley Fish challenges both left- and right-wing thinkers by directly attacking the notion that literary studies might engage and influence political issues. All the sniping over politically driven scholarship, he argues, isn't worth the ammunition; given the structure of both politics and the academy, literary scholarship simply will not reach an audience that might convert it into effective political action. Once the boundary between literature and the day's political debates was porous, or even nonexistent. Now, "deprived of a secure if unofficial place in the corridors of government and commerce," he writes, "literary activity is increasingly pursued in the academy where proficiency is measured by academic standards and rewarded by the gatekeepers of an academic guild." This professionalization has guaranteed a permanent place for students of literature, but it has also taken them out of the political sphere--and activist scholars cannot wish that fact away "by changing the object of one's attention from poems to T.V. shows or by changing the name of the literary enterprise to, say, cultural studies." There are no paths from the academy to political power. By the same token, right-wing attacks on recent trends in literary scholarship are woefully misguided; there is no danger of the cultural studies professoriat working a revolution in America. Fish goes on to argue that academic literary scholars should not try to justify their profession by appealing to some larger goal, but should celebrate and extend the traditions of their craft, extolling the pleasures and challenges handed down by their predecessors.
Written with rare grace and incisive wit, Professional Correctness presents Fish at his best: provocative, unpredictable, and full of good sense. It is a book that challenges the profession of literary criticism even as it glories in its pleasures.

About this title

About the Author

About the Author:
Stanley Fish is Professor of English, Professor of Law, and Associate Vice-Provost at Duke University, and is Executive Director of the Duke University Press. His many books include the classic Surprised by Sin and There's No Such Thing as Free Speech...And It's a Good Thing, Too.

Reviews

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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198123736
• ISBN 13: 9780198123736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160