surprised naturally justifying postmodern

books:

Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric

1 review
Gary A. Olson

State University of New York Press, 2002

Is what they said he said, what he said?
Is what they said he said actually what he said or should we be listening to what HE said he said instead? In "Justifying Belief," Gary Olsen examines the non-literary or - excuse the phrase - theory based works of Stanley Fish. Fish, of course, is one of the most demonized and malligned academics of the day; many people, in fact, know him solely by what his critics have said about him. That is ...

Surprised by Sin: Reader in " Paradise Lost "

3 reviews
Stanley Eugene Fish

Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

A classic of Milton criticism
According to Fish, "Paradise Lost" operates according to a mechanism of rhetorical indirection that works on all rhetorical levels, from depiction of character to deployment of tropes. Milton wants to show us how our fallen state corrupts and distorts our responses to poetry and instruction; the poem is constructed as a series of interlocking traps for the reader, who is lured into reacting in ...

Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies

1 review
Stanley Eugene Fish

Clarendon Press, 1989

The right sort of medicine for certain types.
"Doing What Comes Naturally" is perhaps one of the best recent expressions of a certain type of American literature. That type can be found in the writings of such persons as Mencken and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Philosophically, the expression for it is "pragmatism," but what it really is is probably best expressed by a phrase written by Fish for another book. The book is called "Professional ...