Fish, Stanley Eugene

Biography

Stanley Eugene Fish was born April 19, 1938 in Providence, Rhode Island. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1959. He did graduate work at Yale University, from which he received a Master's Degree in 1960 and a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in 1962. His dissertation was entitled The Poetry of Awareness: A Reassessment of John Skelton .

Fish taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1962-1974, at Johns Hopkins University from 1974-1985, and at Duke University from 1985-1998. He was chair of the Department of English at both Johns Hopkins (1983-1985) and Duke University (1986-1992). In January 1999 he was appointed Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a position in which he continues to serve as of 2003 and where he also holds a professorship in English and Criminal Justice.

Fish is widely known for his work in a variety of areas: Milton, reader-response criticism, professionalism, political correctness, legal theory, and literary theory more generally. Throughout his career Fish has focused on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, particularly poetry. This is the area in which Fish has taught and published the most, beginning with his dissertation on the poet John Skelton, and continuing through his earliest book publications--including John Skelton's Poetry (1965), Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967), Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (1972), and The Living Temple : George Herbert and Catechizing (1978)--to his latest collection of essays, How Milton Works (2001).

From 1980 onwards, with the publication of Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Stanley Fish's work took a much more explicitly theoretical turn. He is frequently acknowledged as one of the founders of reader-response criticism, a reference to his work beginning in the 1970s. The question of interpretation has been central to his scholarly interests, from early reader-response work focusing on the text, to a more reader-centered position and the theory of interpretive communities, to the problem of theorizing interpretation in legal studies.

Note: Much of the information in this summary of Stanley Fish's work was drawn from an article on Fish by Reed Way Dasenbrock in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

Chronology