Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Clarendon Lectures in English)

By Stanley Fish

Book Overview

Few literary scholars have won the fame--or notoriety--achieved by Stanley Fish. As a founder of Reader Response Theory, critic of what he calls free speech ideology, and activist chair of the English Department at Duke University, he has become an icon to a new generation of leftist literary critics--and a demon to right-wing opponents of "tenured radicals," as Roger Kimball called them. How ironic, then, that Fish now makes a powerful case that politics and literary studies don't mix.
In Professional Correctness, Stanley Fish challenges both left- and right-wing thinkers by directly attacking the notion that literary studies might engage and influence political issues. All the sniping over politically driven scholarship, he argues, isn't worth the ammunition; given the structure of both politics and the academy, literary scholarship simply will not reach an audience that might convert it into effective political action. Once the boundary between literature and the day's political debates was porous, or even nonexistent. Now, "deprived of a secure if unofficial place in the corridors of government and commerce," he writes, "literary activity is increasingly pursued in the academy where proficiency is measured by academic standards and rewarded by the gatekeepers of an academic guild." This professionalization has guaranteed a permanent place for students of literature, but it has also taken them out of the political sphere--and activist scholars cannot wish that fact away "by changing the object of one's attention from poems to T.V. shows or by changing the name of the literary enterprise to, say, cultural studies." There are no paths from the academy to political power. By the same token, right-wing attacks on recent trends in literary scholarship are woefully misguided; there is no danger of the cultural studies professoriat working a revolution in America. Fish goes on to argue that academic literary scholars should not try to justify their profession by appealing to some larger goal, but should celebrate and extend the traditions of their craft, extolling the pleasures and challenges handed down by their predecessors.
Written with rare grace and incisive wit, Professional Correctness presents Fish at his best: provocative, unpredictable, and full of good sense. It is a book that challenges the profession of literary criticism even as it glories in its pleasures.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198123736
• ISBN13: 9780198123736
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.7" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

The Plot Thickens

Perhaps the most interesting distinction Stanley Fish makes in this book is the one between what he calls "plot-thinking" and "being-thinking," if I remember the terms well enough. The first sort is a kind of tactical thinking--what do I need to do to get my points across right now? The second is a bit slower, it is the sort of thinking that says "what do I need to do for myself, given the sort of person I am?" Essentially, what Fish is saying is a kind of lecture of the "new historicists" and the other radicalisms that have become so important in the academy. A great many of course will hate him for saying this, becauseit means a delay in the sort of confrontation with Power that so many seem to desire these days. The theory operating for these people is that our metaphors are bad, and thus we must change them, which is why we need writers. This, or so it seems to me, is a very American sort of solution, yet it does not appear to bother the new historicists, nor do they appear to care about the destruction of the liberal, reasonably well-read public that used to form the backbone of support for leftist causes--schoolteachers, social workers, etc.--that is proceeding today as those who might have entered into such careers in previous times are relentlessly told that their work simply serves to reinforce "the Anglo-Saxon warrior brotherhood" that apparently runs things around here, at least according to one of these scholars. For all anyone knows, of course, this might be true, but to give young people the choice between being English professor and being a tool of power is not, I don't think anyway, very helpful. Stanley Fish's counsel of moderation, therefore, is I think of great value, which is to say that even if inside the academy he is thought of as someone who does not respect difference, from the outside looking in he looks a lot better than some I could name. Anyway, in the days to come, which are increasingly looking like they will be made up of a vast, illiterate population ruled by an equally illiterate stockbroker class, policed by a group of "discourse specialists" whose job it will be to censor the books and declare their meanings too obscure for the public, which come to think of it is what we have now, Stanley Fish might be remembered by some few of us as, perhaps, the last man to write in English.