Doing What Comes Naturally

In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In "Doing What Comes Naturally," Stanley Fish refuses the dilemma posed by this question and argues that ...

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In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In "Doing What Comes Naturally," Stanley Fish refuses the dilemma posed by this question and argues that while we can never separate our judgments from the contexts in which they are made, those judgments are nevertheless authoritative and even, in the only way that matters, objective. He thus rejects both the demand for an ahistorical foundation, and the conclusion that in the absence of such a foundation we reside in an indeterminate world. In a succession of provocative and wide-ranging chapters, Fish explores the implications of his position for our understanding of legal, literary, and psychoanalytic interpretation, the nature of professional and institutional culture, and the place of reason in a world that is rhetorical through and through.

Contents
Preface
Meaning and Constraint
1.Introduction: Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road 1
2.With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida 37
3.Why No One's Afraid of Wolfgang Iser 68
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Contents
Preface
Meaning and Constraint
1.Introduction: Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road 1
2.With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida 37
3.Why No One's Afraid of Wolfgang Iser 68
4.Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in Law and Literature 87
5.Wrong Again 103
6.Fish v. Fiss 120
7.Change 141
Professionalism
8.No Bias, No Merit: The Case Against Blind Submission 163
9.Short People Got No Reason to Live: Reading Irony 180
10.Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies 197
11.Anti-Professionalism 215
12.Transmuting the Lump: Paradise Lost, 1942-1979 247
13.Don't Know Much About the Middle Ages: Posner on Law and Literature 294
Consequences
14.Consequences 315
15.Anti-Foundationalism, Theory Hope, and the Teaching of Composition 342
16.Still Wrong After All These Years 356
17.Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory 372
18.Unger and Milton 399
19.Critical SelfConsciousness, Or Can We Know What We're Doing? 436
Rhetoric
20.Rhetoric 471
21.Force 503
22.Withholding the Missing Portion: Psychoanalysis and Rhetoric 525
Notes 555
Index 595
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