Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fishis an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 April 1938
CountryUnited States of America
Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.
Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.
People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.
It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.
What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.
The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'
Eighteen months tops, everybody's gone. The accomplishments you've already achieved will fade away like butter in the sun. In the university world, if you pause for a while, and two or three years later, you say we can start again, you're farther back than you were when the whole enterprise began.
Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.
I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.
In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.
It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.
No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.
Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.
I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.