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Rick Politician
Christian Stuart
English 578
April 6, 2005
SA 1.3
In the academic essay, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” Stanley Fish, a professor and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at University of Illinois at Chicago, discusses the relationship between a text and the interpretation of that text by readers.
He postulates that a text, does not inherently have a particular meaning, but it is rather an interpreter’s already in-place assumptions about the text that determine the meaning (Stygall 307).  For example, the word love has many meanings.  Depending on the sentence, or category of literary work “love” exists within, the word will take on new significance.  If one reads an Ancient Greek text, the already in-place assumptions about the genre may cause one to interpret the word “love” between an older man and a young boy as paedophilia, as apposed to father/son love one might attach to the word when reading a John Irving novel.
Fish also argues that “interpretive strategies” used to analyze texts “are not our own, but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility” (Stygall 311).  Applying this to our example of “love”, Fish might say one is part of an interpretive community that identifies the various meanings “love” in separate texts differently due to one’s culturally imbued knowledge.  This implies that Fish also believes people “are products of social and cultural patterns of thought” (Stygall 311).  One thinks the way they do because that is what one learned living within their particular society.  In summary, interpretative communities confer meaning to a text based on common, in-place assumptions they have regarding the text.  The text itself has an infinite number of potential meanings, but no one-particular meaning without an interpretive community.
            Fish presents one more main point in his essay.  He comments on the dichotomy critics believe exists between the implied meaning of a text by the author and the understood meaning by the readers.  Fish believes “there can be no adversary relationship between text and self because they are the necessarily related products of the same cognitive possibilities” (Stygall 314).  In other words, if the author, their text and the readers are all part of the same interpretive community, then they will all comprehend the interpreted meaning similarly and together.  Therefore, the meaning of a text exists not as static entity, but as a continually changing meaning that will be shaped by all of its past and present interpreters (Stygall 314).