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Inscribed to the title page, "To David, We should continue to meet oftener than we do-with great affection, Stanley Fish, July 1986". With Lodge's pencil markings to the margins. In the USA, Stanley Fish is one of the big punchers of the academic world, a renowned intellectual showman and top-dollar professor. In Britain, he will always be better known as Morris Zapp, one of the most memorable characters of David Lodge's campus novels, especially 'Changing Places' (1975) and 'Small World' (1984). In the first of these, Zapp, a ruthlessly professional professor from California, sets out to be the world's greatest Jane Austen expert (though he rather dislikes her writing). In the second, he becomes even more famous and successful by learning all the party tricks of French literary theory. Charming, intelligent and unstoppable, fuelled by egomania (though Lodge gives him private anxieties to make him sympathetic), he is openly disdainful of his muddle-headed, shabbily dressed British counterparts, who are apparently incapable of publishing the necessary paradigm-shattering books. Lodge was happy for it to be known that Morris Zapp was Stanley Fish, and one imagines that Fish would have been happy enough too. For Zapp's real-life counterpart has always been a sharp publicity seeker, and has prospered as an intellectual controversialist. He began as a wunderkind at Berkeley ("Euphoric State University" in 'Changing Places') in the 1960s, making his name in his 20s with a book on John Milton. 'Surprised by Sin' (1967) was a sublimely self-confident debut, grabbing the greatest poem in the language, 'Paradise Lost', by the scruff of its neck and shaking it to life (for undergraduates and their grateful teachers, at least). It had a simple argument, remorselessly pursued (as is Fish's way). Paradise Lost recreates in the mind of the reader "the drama of the Fall to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam's troubled clarity". Fish's triumph was to make out of common student misconceptions about the poem (Isn't Satan rather magnificent? Isn't Adam admirable for joining Eve in her disobedience?) a corrective polemic. Milton tempts us into these mistakes, and many others. The errors of undergraduates less clever than Fish are made the evidence of our fallen nature. It is a pity that Zapp disappeared from Lodge's fiction after a cameo appearance in 'Nice Work' (1986), for Fish went on to become even more successful and even more like a creature from some satire upon academic mores. He went from professorship to professorship until he arrived at the little-known but hugely rich Duke University in North Carolina. There he became an intellectual entrepreneur, upping the profile of his new university with controversy-causing books and a series of "signings" of top-rank humanities professors. With Fish as a figurehead, Duke became the Blackburn Rovers of the academic world, spending its way up the Premiership table (though Fish himself moved on again, to more garlands at the University of Illinois). Fish is best known for his analysis of interpretive communities - an offshoot of reader-response criticism. His work in this field examines how the interpretation of a text is dependent upon each reader's own subjective experience in one or more communities, each of which is defined as a 'community' by a distinct epistemology. From the library of David Lodge. Soft covers. Fourth printing.
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