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Text and Meaning in Stanley Fish’s Reader-Response Criticism

Article · November 2013

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Cognitive Discourses International Multidisciplinary Journal pISSN 2321-1075 eISSN 2347-5692
Volume 1, Issue 3, November 2013 Retrieved from: http:cdimj.naspublishers.com
Cognitive Discourses International Multidisciplinary Journal pISSN 2321-1075 eISSN 2347-5692
Volume 1, Issue 3, November 2013 Retrieved from: http:cdimj.naspublishers.com

TEXT AND MEANING IN STANELY FISH’S READER-

RESPONSE CRITICISM
P. Prayer Elmo Raj1
Abstract
The interface between text and meaning is imperative in reader-response criticism setting a platform
for a discourse on reading as a psychic procedure cutting across context and interpretive locations. The
temporal and the spatial persuasions on the activity of reading that infringes upon the semantic knowledge
recreate meaning. Therefore, an informed reader becomes central on par with the author in creating a text. This
paper is an attempt to interrogate the interconnection between text and reading within the process of reading.
Is the reader decisive in establishing the significance of a text? Reader response theory anticipates key
role to reading as an activity which weaves meaning in a text through an actively interpretive procedure. Fish
emphasizes on the temporal character of the reading event in opposition to the spatial that relies on capturing the
text through a glance that takes in a whole. Fish traces meaning of the work being inherent in the act of knowing,
the experience that an informed reader has as he enters into the act of reading. An informed reader is a
“competent speaker of the language out of which the text is built up; is in full possession of the semantic
knowledge that a mature…listener brings to his task of comprehension…; and has literary competence” (Fish
48). However, the formalists object affective fallacy as a perplexity between a creative work and its
consequence, ‘what it is and what it does.’ It commences by attempting to obtain the criterions of criticism from
the psychological effects of the work of art and could end up in impressionism and relativism. Therefore, the
work of art as an object of critique vanishes. Fish views the objectivity of a text as an illusion that persuades
through its actuality of a line of print that is the ordnance of value and meaning that a reader correlates with it.
One also finds Fish arguing that “there are no formal patterns but that there are always formal patters; it is just
that the formal patterns there always are will always be the product of a prior interpretive act and therefore will
be available for discerning only so long as that act is in force” (Fish 267). Here text and meaning stay
disconnected but overwhelms reading experience. The normality of language brings the preconception of certain
informedness that allows the plurality and openness of the text that is positioned not universally but presumes a
fastidious manner of interpretation that allows the text to change. When interpretive acts become the source of
forms, the execution of the act configures sequential of forms allowing constancy of interpretation among the
readers. Manifold ways of interpretation from the point of view of a reader aids the existence of meaning that
precedes the interpretive acts. The interpretive strategy of the reader views the world from an indistinguishable
form that differs from consciousness in order to deduce a text as the identical or dissimilar features shedding
light on why a reader may approach the text one way or another. Reading, in the traditional sense, and writing, as
a means to creating meaning in texts, comprises their possessions and intentions. Fish states that “the act of
recognizing literature is not constrained by something in the text, nor does it issue from an independent and
arbitrary will; rather, it proceeds from a collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will
be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers continues to abide by it” (Fish 11). This
exemplifies the plural and fragmented nature of the meaning of a text interconnected with different context. The
literal meaning of the text habitually refer to a sole meaning but Fish intends multiple literal meanings of a text
that is expected at sequence in different situations. Literal meaning, in a situation, is independent and the right of
the reader at a given context and as the context differs the literal meaning differs because we are never ‘not in a’
situation and not in the interpretive act. Therefore, the plausibility of reaching the various echelons of meaning
ahead of and beneath interpretation is determined by the context.
The difference between direct and indirect speech acts are challenged by Fish. Direct speech acts are the
meaning of utterance imbedded in the text and indirect speech acts are the meaning outside the text but implicit
by the audience because of the allocated contextual comprehension with the speaker. The contextual

1
Assistant Professor of English, Karunya University.
Cognitive Discourses International Multidisciplinary Journal pISSN 2321-1075 eISSN 2347-5692
Volume 1, Issue 3, November 2013 Retrieved from: http:cdimj.naspublishers.com
comprehension is naturally deemed to be subject to “normal” situations. The audience are imbibed with the
ability to distinguish between the direct and indirect speech acts. However normal situations are content specific,
superfluous and disjointed because of the plurality of the context is that is claimed over the text and its meaning
being subjected to certain constrictions. The abstraction of the text is over come as it is always located in a
situation that is determined by the purpose for which it can be used.
While attempting to comprehend the limitations in textual readings, he “turns to the communities within
which interpreters function, and the interdictions and dynamic schemas that both close certain readings in the
present, yet remain open to future methodologies where what is now unacceptable, becomes the acceptable or
even cutting-edge way of interpreting” (Lane 98). The interdictions and schemas are absent in the actual text but
the interpretive communities enters into and enterprise that discovers the possibility of meanings. The ‘canons of
acceptability’ becomes interdictive through its possibilities of ethical readings whereby values are found which
otherwise condemns the texts. Therefore the canons of acceptability attributes the authors the possible change.
Fish’s reader-response theory can be viewed having a phenomenological and epistemological stance.
While the phenomenological approach deals with the happenings in the reader’s psyche as the reader reads. Fish
is concerned, here, with what really ensues in the act of reading, “an analysis of the developing responses of the
reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time” (Fish 27). He intends to examine what the
text does as opposed to the formalist analysis of what the text means. The formalists consider meaning as
embedded in the textual textual artefact. However, Fish develops form criticism that discards the author’s
intentionality and positions meaning within the field of the text. Interpretive community fabricates a reality
advancing a text with meaning within a context. Therefore meaning corresponds to an undying superstructure or
substructure of actuality that interprets within the epistemological realm as it relates to how one comes to know.
The meaning of any work of art is not intrinsic but relies on the reader or the interpretive community. The action
of the reader is the centre of attention, “where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having
meaning” (Fish 158). He defines meaning “as an experience; it occurs; it does something; it makes us do
something. Indeed, I would go so far as to say, in direct contradiction of Wimsatt and Beardsley, that what it
does is what it means” (Fish 34). Text is detached that is motivated through actuality that denies ontological
reality or the continuation of the blatant entity denying liberty to text. Lang maintains that “the text does not
contain meaning: despite being written upon, it is a tabula rasa, a blank state onto which the reader, in reading,
actually writes the text.” Fish’s hermeneutic intend becomes clear as he emphasizes that reading involves
presumptions into the text with almost no prospect of achieving any objective or creator centred interpretation.
The interpretive act is globular where the interpreter finds what he seeks. Therefore, knowledge is neither
objective nor contextually conditioned. As Lang states, “All that one thinks and “knows” is an interpretation that
is only made possible by the social context in which one lives.” The context in which one exists determines the
thought process of a person denying a person to think beyond the borders of culture. The different schemes of an
interpreter “are community property, and insofar as they at once enable and limit the operations of his
consciousness…Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading
but for writing texts, for constituting their properties” (Fish 14).Similar to languages, interpretive communities
are traditional and subjectively configured. Therefore, “the way a community lives is in no way a reflection of
some higher reality, it is rather a construction, or edifice that has been erected by consensus” (Lang). The
interpretive approaches interconnect the culture’s ethics that is founded on the external reality and correlates to
no specificity. Language as communication is a sense of knowing the meanings of discrete words and the tenets
of bringing together “as a way of thinking, a form of life, shares us, and implicates us in a world of already-in-
place objects, purposes, goals, procedures, values and so on; and it is to the features of that world any words we
utter will be heard as necessarily referring” (303-4). In this sense, literature is not an encompassing “principle of
truth or art that exists in an atemporal state” (Lang) but progresses within itself to illumine the culture.
Consequently “the act of recognizing literature is not constrained by something in the text, nor does it issue from
an independent and arbitrary will; rather, it proceeds from a collective decision as to what will count as
literature, a decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers continues to abide
by it” (Fish 11).
Meaning as reader’s experience is an evolutionary apprehension and comprehension of the text.
Reading is an act centring the subjective experience of a reader exemplifying meaning into that experience,
 Cognitive Discourses International Multidisciplinary Journal pISSN 2321-1075 eISSN 2347-5692
Volume 1, Issue 3, November 2013 Retrieved from: http:cdimj.naspublishers.com
engendering a response of the reader to the words in the text. The temporal facet of literary experience relies on
“the basis of the method as a consideration of the temporal flow of the reading experience, and it is assumed that
the reader responds in terms of that flow and not to the whole utterance” (Fish 1970 27). The experience of a
reader is “regulating and organizing mechanism, pre-existing the actual experience” (Fish 1979 143) consenting
to allocate a semantic value to a lexical frame in relation to its context and a surfeiting of language experience
that determines the possibility of preference and response. According to Fish, “the temporal flow is monitored
and structured by everything the reader brings with him, by his competences; and it is by taking these into
account as they interact with the temporal left to right reception of the verbal string, that I am able to chart and
project the developing response” (Fish 1970 143). He establishes a system of rules that exists to make achievable
linguistic experience. Thus reading is constituted by something that is diverse from its frame of reference.
Meaning is an enduring experience that comes from the past ensuing into the present in the act of reading. It
unites a subjective vision of meaning with an independent of the text encouraging the reader to response. The act
of reading is something the reader does to avow that reading is impracticable in the absence of the reader.
Reading as a process, then, recurrently interrogates the reader’s psyche and meaning occurs between the
language and mind but when the reader is not able to deduce an answer from the text, the reader is mislaid. The
text incessantly unlocks and closes to allow the reader to drift away to illustrate the reader with “unredeemed
promise of its return” (Fish 1979 125). Fish allows the reader to deem the responses in a composite manner
implicitly embedded meanings within words that creatively permits the reader to explore reading strategies
endorsed by varied interpretive modes. The temporal nature of reading experience stride back and in a single
capture encompasses the whole text as the reader reads. The informed reader is a proficient speaker of the
language from which the text is created and owns the semantic knowledge of that of a mature listener with
literary capability. Literature survives and indicates when it is read as it encircles an affective force making
reading an active process implanted in the text. The text is inert but it is “set not for all places or all times but for
wherever and however long a particular way of reading is in force, it is a text that can change” (Fish 1978, 630).
The text is static in its space and time but active by and through its context as we detach sole meaning of a text in
different situations. The formal structures of a text identify the interpretive acts which utter the forms and
intentions that helps identify a given text for a reader. The constitution of experience that is made accessible by a
reader inclined examination through an “inconclusive adducing of evidence which characterises formalist
analysis” (152). The supposition is a “sense that it is embedded or encoded in the text, and that it can be taken in
at a single glance. These assumptions are, in order, positivistic, holistic, and spatial, and to have them is to be
committed both to a goal and to a procedure. The goal is to settle on a meaning, and the procedure involves first
stepping back from the text, and then putting together or otherwise calculating the discrete units of significance it
contains” (158). Literature, therefore, is a reflection of an ideology that knits communal values without
abstraction but historically accustomed and conditioned. Fish also challenges the doubt that a reader centric
approach inexorably relativist through its subjective connotations and its autonomy from the sets of rules which
are inter-subjective. The subject-object dichotomy disintegrates with no pure subject, influenced by the
interpretive community that offers reading strategies to generate communities of interpreters or object, literary
text is always constructed.
REFERENCES
Fish, Stanley E. (1976). Interpreting the Variorum. Critical Inquiry. 2:3. 465-485. Print.
---. (1978). Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the
Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases. Critical Inquiry. 4:4. 625-644. Print.
---. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. Print.
Lang, Chris. “The Reader-Response Theory of Stanley Fish.” A Brief History of Literary Theory III.
<http://www.xenos.org/essays/litthry4.htm#Footnote34A>. Web.
Lane, Richard J. Fifty Key Literary Theorists. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
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