Summary of the work of Stanley fish's' Is there a text in the class?

Answer 1

are you kidding? the answers you get here will not be good enough for a class where you are reading fish. Okay, the words on the page don't have any meaning without a reader. The interaction between the reader and the text is not, however, straight forward rationality responds to signs. Rather, the reader brings with him/her a whole web of interpretive strategies, formed in community, that determine his/her understanding of and response to the text. Similarly, the text has come from a community with a web of interpretive strategies that filled the words/signs with particular meanings for the writer. These are not really accessible to us. What is important is that we be aware that the Enlightenment idea of an idependent, cold, rational thinker/reader is impossible. Before you read the first word, you're deeply embedded in this web of meanings and associations and prejudices that determine how you can read the text. There is no text without the reader and there is no reader without a whole crowd of influences leaning over his/her shoulder. So, a rich white Englishman finds something very different in, say, The Bible, than did, say, the enslaved Africans on American soil two hundred years ago.