Stanley Fish

How to Write a Sentence is one of the most glorious books I have ever read. Fish's passion for words and writing--his own or the works of others--is evident in, appropriately, every sentence, whether written by this book's author or included as a model sentence upon which Fish's readers can base their own literary attempts. However, the very gloriousness of its language turns this book into something that cannot easily be dashed through on an airplane flight, or tossed off in a lazy hour at show more the beach. I found myself reading unexpectedly slowly, savouring the words and structure of each paragraph, tucking the book into the seat-back pocket between chapters to re-consider its contents before retrieving the volume, only to re-read the same pages over again. On a three-hour flight, I managed to read fewer than a hundred pages (this is probably only really shocking if you know me in person). Fish's ideas have lingered with me all week, and I find myself itching to practice his model sentences at odd times.

Everyone should read this book. If I am ever allowed to teach Freshman Composition, I would assign this book to my students in a heartbeat; I wish I could send a copy to every one of my former secondary-school students. It is at once inspiring and elegantly readable, the perfect companion for lovers of literature and aspiring writers all at once. How to Write a Sentence is a companion and a textbook simultaneously: Fish introduces his reader to books and sentences he loves (as if having a conversation) and then offers instructions for replicating the style and form of each example. Read this; assign this; practice following its guidelines; read it again.

Fish's slim little volume is as revolutionary and fresh for its time as Elements of Style was back in the early 1900s. Nearly a century later, How to Write a Sentence gives readers--and aspiring writers--fresh models and useful exercises that point out stylistic technique in concrete, practical ways. Read this book, but slowly. It is a delight.

(Original review: http://legereinterlitteras.blogspot.com/2013/01/stanley-fishs-sentence-style-bet... show less

Stanley Fish, a professor of law and of literature, has written a little gem of book about arguments: political, marital, legal, and academic. And although he offers several useful strategies in how to win various kinds of arguments, his principal thesis is that argumentation is an essential and unavoidable aspect of communication. The world we live in is one of constant argument in the sense that much of our communication is an effort to convince the hearer that what we say is true.

One of show more the earliest (and perhaps most primitive) form of argument is that from authority. Parents often prevail over their offspring simply by asserting, “Because I said so!” Others look to Holy Scripture or recognized experts. Ironically, Aristotle identified the technique of argument from authority, and then he became one!

Fish describes politics as “not a fully rational process, although neither is it irrational.” He points out that “there is no neutral space from the vantage point of which the varieties of spin can be inventoried and assessed.” Arguments themselves don’t end political debates. Neither “side” is likely to be convinced. No matter what rational arguments you assert to an avid Trump supporter, you won’t convince him or her that their hero is a demented moron, nor will you convince detractors that he is a good person. In fact, Fish claims that Trump's tendency to advance both sides of the same argument depending on the day is irrelevant. As Fish says, Trump could never be off message, because he is the message. For Fish, Trump’s victory is a triumph of pathos (emotion) over logos (reason) and ethos (the character of the speaker).

Yet sometimes, political arguments seem to prevail all at once, e.g., the legitimacy of same-sex marriage is now recognized by a substantial majority of the population. There, the rational arguments themselves probably did not carry the day as much as gay pride parades and general acceptance of homosexuality in television and film. It was unpredictable confluence of cultural forces that had the most influence on creating a new level of acceptance.

Marital arguments are a class unto their own. Fish asserts that one spouse is almost never able to use rationality to convince the other spouse of the superiority of the first’s position. Rather, since most marital arguments involve hurt feelings, there really is no realistic chance of “winning” them. Fish recommends that one spouse begin the rapprochement by conceding that he or she was wrong and hope for the best.

Fish asserts that most arguments are constrained by what he calls “bounded argument spaces.” Arguments that are “allowed” are distinguished from those that just won’t fly. Each category is formally identified and known to everyone participating. Legal arguments presuppose a large fairly well understood bounded argument space. The practitioners of legal argumentation (lawyers) spend a lot of time and effort learning what kinds of arguments are to be permitted. Indeed, most trials are not so much attempts to determine what happened as efforts of each side to fit facts into legally pre-recognized categories like “negligence,” “notice,” or “conspiracy.” [Note: legal research is defined by these categories as well, lending a pre-determined outcome to the parameters of argumentation.]

What is or is not a proper academic argument is itself something continually being argued about. One aspect of academic arguments identified by Fish is “in addition to restrictions on the arguments one can make, there are restrictions on who can make them and receive a respectful hearing.” Without a Ph.D., you’re not likely to have your interpretation of Paradise Lost published in a respected academic journal, no matter how original or compelling it is. Part of legitimization also involves employing accepted arcane terms associated with the field. Clarity can be lost in the process, but everyone is happy because the argumentation now is refutable only by initiates into the club.

Fish contends that argumentation is an inescapable aspect of life and that pining for a world without argument is a fool’s errand. To him:

"…the wish to escape argument is really the wish to escape language, which is really the wish to escape politics, and is finally the wish to escape mortality—and it won’t matter a whit. For one effect of inhabiting the condition of difference—the condition of being partial, the condition of not being in direct touch with the final unity and full meaning of the universe—is that we long to transcend it; and it is that longing, forever disappointed, that keeps us going."

Or as Kingsley Amis once wrote, "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."

Evaluation: I liked this book and I liked its conclusion. For me, arguments [properly conducted within appropriate bounded argument spaces] are fun. Like the Monty Python sketch Fish recounts in the beginning when a man enters an office and says to the receptionist, “I’d like to have an argument, please,” my wife and I communicate mainly by argumentation, as a subset of our competitive relationship generally. We agree on almost nothing, so we will always have something to talk [argue (?)] about.

(JAB) show less

Summary: An analysis of the idea of academic freedom, identifying five schools of thought, arguing for limiting this to the core professional duties of an academic in one’s institution and disciplinary field.

The relevance of this work is clearly evident in the presence of regular stories of how academic freedom in our universities is threatened or complaints about particular actions of faculty that are rationalized as “academic freedom.” What can or cannot be taught in a classroom? Can show more a faculty member email her students about the need to protest in favor of Palestinian rights against Israel? Is it an infringement on academic freedom to prohibit wearing political clothing and buttons in a class one is teaching? Is it proper for a faculty member to disclose one’s political or religious beliefs as they bear on the course material at the beginning of a course? Should a faculty member be punished for publishing research findings arrived at according to the standards for research in one’s field if those findings challenge accepted social norms and the paradigms of one’s discipline?

At least part of the answer, Stanley Fish maintains, is how one defines “academic freedom.” For him, it hinges both on what we understand to be the scope of the duties of an academic and how expansive our idea of freedom is. In this work, drawn from the Campbell Lectures sponsored by Rice University, Fish delineates five schools of thought from a very narrow definition of academic freedom to a very expansive one and argues that only the narrowest reflects what can really be called “academic freedom.”

The five schools of thought are:

1. The “It’s a job” school. Educators provide a service of advancing through research and instruction a particular body of knowledge in one’s discipline as specified by the course catalog and syllabus. Within the scope of their professional duties they should enjoy freedom to do their job. They are not inculcating moral values, mobilizing social justice warriors, or training citizens to uphold some vision of democracy. Such things, while commendable in their role as citizens and enjoying First Amendment protection do not fall under the scope of academic freedom.

2. The “For the common good” school. Those in this school, going back to the 1915 AAUP Declaration of Principles would go beyond the protection of scholarly work done within the scope of one’s professional duties to emphasize the academy’s role in upholding democratic values and principles of justice against the “tyranny of public opinion.”

3. The “Academic exceptionalism or uncommon beings” school. This argues that by virtue of training, gifts, and character, academics are exceptional persons who not only correct popular opinion but are not subject to the same laws and restrictions of ordinary citizens. One example is the Virginia state law prohibiting access of state employees to pornography on state-owned computers without supervisory permission. Professors argued “academic freedom” rights to warrant declaring the law invalid for them.

4. The “Academic freedom as critique” school. This school, with Judith Butler as a leading representative, argues that the norms and standards of the academy and one’s discipline are inherently conservative, and academic freedom protects dissent from or critique of those norms. The work of a scholar is to interrogate those norms.

5. The “Academic freedom as revolution” school. This school invokes academic freedom to protect the scholar whose critique challenges and seeks the overthrow of corruption in the academy and society for the sake of social justice. This has been used to justify “academic squatting” in which professors, instead of teaching the advertised course, use the classroom to advance their critique and to advocate revolutionary activity.

Fish places himself in the “It’s a job” school, contending that this is the only context in which the protections of academic freedom apply. Academic freedom exists to further scholarship. Period. While other aims may be laudable, they do not fall under the rubric of academic freedom. Fish observes both the hubris and the dislocation of the focus of academic work in the “common good” school. This places academic work in the service of something else. Against both the critique and revolution schools, Fish does not dispute the conservative character of disciplines but emphasizes that new disciplines do emerge from old as “existing norms preside over their own alteration,” citing as an example the rise of women’s studies. This approach is a safeguard against the unraveling of the university, which he believes would be the consequence if these approaches prevail.

Finally, he returns to the idea of exceptionalism–the idea that academic freedom protects individuals from legal requirements with which ordinary citizens must comply. Much of this is a discussion of public employment law and specific legal cases. The basic message here is that academic freedom is a professional norm and not a legal right. Much of one’s professional duties are contractually established. Speech in the course of one’s employment is different than the exercise of First Amendment rights, with which academic freedom is often confused. One can’t depart from the subject matter of a course to talk about whatever one wants. On the other hand, the results of research undertaken as part of one’s duties, when conducted according to disciplinary practice, cannot be “directed or scripted, by the government.”

Fish’s analysis did two things for me. One was to bring greater clarity to the terminology of “academic freedom.” Instead of an umbrella term to cover many kinds of activity, Fish argues for a focused used, referring to the professional duties of an academic as well as the core function of a university as Fish understands it:

“The academy is the place where knowledge is advanced, where the truth about matters physical, conceptual, and social is sought. That’s the job, and that’s also the aspirational norm: the advancement of knowledge and the search for truth. The values of advancing knowledge and discovering truth are not extrinsic to academic activity; they constitute it.”

The other thing Fish did was make clear that academic freedom has no legal basis, but rather a shared consensus that protects professors, not in anything they do, but in the performance of their scholarly work. In particular, it seems that disciplines, college administrations and boards, and the state ideally ought to share a consensus that it is vital to protect the freedom of academics to pursue scholarly work without dictating the results of that work, including teaching that reflects the current state of learning in a discipline.

I would like to see Fish update this work, written in 2014, addressing the actions of state legislatures to dictate what may and may not be taught in courses. Traditionally, these are decisions made by departments and colleges in establishing a course of study, including the content of courses according to the current body of learning relevant to the course subject. The “it’s a job approach” in this context makes faculty the mouthpiece of a state ideology in the guise of complying with specified course context. Often this means excluding material that constitutes a significant part of the body of knowledge in a discipline. More troubling, it implies that only certain lines of inquiry with state-approved results will be supported. While Fish rightly, I believe, rejects more expansive schools of academic freedom, he fails to answer how to protect the more circumscribed idea of academic freedom he upholds. show less

Surprised by Sin - the title is an obvious dig at C.S. Lewis, whose Introduction to Paradise Lost was one of the books that had led to the post-WWII rehabilitation of Milton - is one of those "you've all been making this too complicated: what it's really about is this..." books. Which would normally mean that it is (a) annoying and (b) misguided. To some extent it is both of those things, but it's also a book that no-one quite manages to ignore, even whilst disagreeing with it. Fish's show more central thesis might be a wilful oversimplification, but the evidence he marshals for it and the methods of analysis he uses really force you to read the book and pay attention to the details. Every other more recent work I've looked at so far has picked up at least one or two of the things Fish spotted in the text of PL and has taken them on in a new direction.

What every critic of PL has to deal with are the famous instabilities of the text, all the points where the poem's explicit message (as expressed e.g. in the voice of the narrator or of an authoritative character like God or Michael) fights with the less orthodox ideas that the language of the poem is suggesting to us. Most critics either assign these to Milton's subversive subconscious or tell us that they are radical ideas slipped into the text in deeply encoded form to avoid the censor; Fish argues that Milton is using a pedagogic trick that involves deliberately allowing his fallen readers to jump to the wrong conclusion, then correcting them and making them think about why they are so easily led into error, and thus ultimately giving them a better understanding of the significance of the Fall to our human existence. The Australian expression "trap for young players" sums it up perfectly...

It's a plausible argument, and it has the big advantage (in lit-crit terms) that it is self-contained, starts from the known perspective of the reader rather than the unknowable one of the author, and works without any need to bring in biographical evidence to support assumptions about what the author "intended". But it also has the big disadvantages that it relies on a completely arbitrary set of assumptions about the doctrinal position the poem is supposed to be promoting, and that it totally ignores the historical context in which the poem was written and published. And (since I'm reading this for pleasure and not as a scholar, I'm allowed to be subjective) it's totally at odds with the picture of Milton I've built up in my own mind. He is just too complex and contradictory a figure, with too many different sets of ideas playing a part in his life, to have invested the effort of dictating a 10000 line poem that reduces to a simple pulpit trick and a two-line message about faith and blind obedience to the commands of God.

I'm still glad I've read it, and there are definitely things I've learnt from it about how to read Milton (the book is worth it just for the discussion of the word "wand'ring"!), but I would be wary of taking it as the last word on "what PL is about". show less