Re: what is your fish?

I think Fish's grammatical attack was right on target -- we use words
without even thinking about what they mean, and I think that's a bad
thing. We take for granted people should care about our opinions
without giving them reason to do so. If you care about reading
communities, then you need to care equally about what binds them
together -- a common language that's not the sole property of the
individual speaker (unless you're James Joyce and unless you happen to
be writing _Finnegans Wake_).

But his denial of content seems a bit impossible to pull off. His
wasn't an absolute denial; I think he meant for content to arise from
close scrutiny of grammar and rhetoric. I don't think any composition
course should be designed with a single theme in mind, but I do think
instructors should pay attention to content when choosing readings.

Jim

Will Hochman wrote:

>> My tropical fish handbook says that you shouldn't put stanleys in the
>> same
>
>> aquarium with bananas, something about ichyittis(?), I think it's fin
>> rot.
>
> I remember when this article came out--Fish's grammatical attack
> struck me as pedantic and his call for composition teachers to teach
> only rhtetoric and grammar struck me as dead wrong. However, I do
> connect Stanley Fish to bananafish on a book of his essays called/Is
> There a Text in This Class./ I'm going back to grad school reading but
> I remember Fish talking about "interpretive communities" and that is
> what I think we are in this bowl. will
>
>--
>
>
> Will Hochman
>
> Associate Professor of English
> Southern Connecticut State University
> 501 Crescent St, New Haven, CT 06515
> 203 392 5024
>
> http://www.southernct.edu/~hochman/willz.html
>

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Received on Tue Dec 17 14:17:27 2002