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Fish, Stanley, “Is there a Text in this Class?” Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

Interpreting the Variorum/Interpretive Communities.

Summary

Stanley Fish’s essay on interpretive communities focuses primarily on readers and their “interpretive strategies”. He asserts that both the stability of interpretation among readers (i.e. different readers will perform similarly when reading the “same” text) and variety of interpretation in the career of a single reader (i.e. the same reader will perform different when reading two “different” texts) are functions of interpretive strategies rather than of texts.

He says that interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading but they are the shape of reading. Hence, they give texts their shape. He goes on to say that interpretive communities are made up of readers who share interpretive strategies which exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than as it usually assumed, the other way around. These interpretive communities grow larger and decline and are no more stable than texts because interpretive strategies are not natural or universal but learned.

(Review)