Reader Response and the Epistemology of Stanley Fish
A few weeks ago Stanley Fish wrote a piece called “God Talk” for the New York Times discussing Terry Eagleton’s new book that deconstructs what Fish calls the “school-yard atheism” of articulates like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. (I disagree with Hitchens about there being no God, by the way, but I find his conversations with South Park Republican Andrew Sullivan thoroughly delightful).
“God Talk Part 2” went up yesterday. Stanley Fish is known for many things, the literary theory of “reader response” among them. When I learned about Fish in div school I connected dots to Strauss and was roundly disregarded. (The same thing happened when I read Kant’s Ethics, but that’s a different story). A few years later I read a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education where Fish said the Straussian influence on his own method is undeniable. (I figure you don’t get to be an intellectual in Chicago without imbibing Strauss somewhere). “Reader response” takes on a different meaning “God Talk Part 2″. The entire piece is framed by Fish’s response to the commenter on the first essay. I think this is a sly and also phenomenologically profound: a popular (and contrarian) intellectual responding in popular media to the vox populi of his readers.
The guts of his argument is something that postmodern theists have been talking about for a long time: it’s nothing new to people who have studied postliberal, paleo-orthodox, emerging church, or narrative theology or who have ever read Francis Schaeffer (note: Schaeffer’s epistemology is a leap-of-faith call to orthodoxy, but he deconstructs scientific certainty in ways that make postmodern theology understandable). So Fish isn’t saying anything new, but the idea that belief in reason is belief is still so far off the radar of so many progressives and positivists.
Excellent! Dead-on! It’s interesting that people become so reactive toward Fish, while little to no attention is granted to the methodology he employs. For me, it seems to amplify that his method has more to do with any of his (potential) arguments, in spite of so much rote quibbling over the minutiae of one position or another. Criticizing him is practically self-defeating, so it has become pretty entertaining watching the weekly theater he’s been putting together.
But I am intrigued. I study the literature of Cormac McCarthy, whose works are strikingly theologically-”postmodern.” And yet, a theoretical groundwork for interpreting his work through such a prism is utterly lacking (not the least with myself), relegating the exploration of his works to the rote mechanics of various camps of literary interpretation and their self-multiplying politics. I’ve asked other theologians for good points of reference for exploring “postmodern theology” or “narrative theology,” but to no avail. You mentioned Schaeffer—a lead I’ll have to follow. Do any other primary works/thinkers come to mind?
Sir
May 19, 2009 at 4:16 am