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

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.

TEXT AND MEANING IN STANELY FISH’S READER-

RESPONSE CRITICISM
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
[Link] 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 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 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 whichare inter-subjective. The subject-
object dichotomy disintegrates with no pure subject, influenced by theinterpretive community that offers
reading strategies to generate communities of interpreters or object, literarytext is always constructed.