Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
View entire collection guide
Search this collection
Table of contents
Title: Stanley Fish papers,
Date (inclusive): 1921-2001, bulk 1960-1998
Collection number: MS-C011
Creator:
Fish, Stanley Eugene
Extent:
64.2 linear feet (157 boxes and 4 oversize folders)
Repository:
University of California, Irvine. Library.
Special Collections and Archives.
Irvine, California 92623-9557
Abstract: This collection documents Stanley Fish's professional career as a literary theorist and academic. Materials are largely textual--including
primarily drafts of his writings, publications, and clippings and photocopies for teaching and research purposes--and range
in coverage from his early student work to his most recent professional activities and publications. The collection also
includes a limited amount of correspondence and many audio recordings, the latter of which document his activities as a public
intellectual and teacher. Although each period of Fish's career is represented in collection materials, documentation from
his time at Duke University is strongest. Materials documenting his activity as an administrator--department chair at Johns
Hopkins and Duke, executive director of Duke Univeristy Press, and dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago--are very
limited.
Language:
English.
Collection open for research.
Property rights reside with the University of California. Literary rights are retained by the creators of the records and
their heirs. For permissions to reproduce or to publish, please contact the Head of Special Collections and University Archives.
All reproduction of materials written by Jacques Derrida must be authorized by designates of his heirs. Contact Special Collections
and Archives for more information.
Stanley Fish papers. MS-C11. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
Gift of Stanley Fish, 1998-2001. Future accruals are expected.
Processed by Kurt Ozment, 2000-2002. Finding aid edited by William Landis, 2004.
Stanley Eugene Fish was born April 19, 1938 in Providence, Rhode Island. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, receiving
his undergraduate degree in 1959. He did graduate work at Yale University, from which he received a Master's Degree in 1960
and a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in 1962. His dissertation was entitled
The Poetry of Awareness: A Reassessment of John Skelton.
Fish taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1962-1974, at Johns Hopkins University from 1974-1985, and at Duke
University from 1985-1998. He was chair of the Department of English at both Johns Hopkins (1983-1985) and Duke University
(1986-1992). In January 1999 he was appointed Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois
at Chicago, a position in which he continues to serve as of 2003 and where he also holds a professorship in English and Criminal
Justice.
Fish is widely known for his work in a variety of areas: Milton, reader-response criticism, professionalism, political correctness,
legal theory, and literary theory more generally.
Throughout his career Fish has focused on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, particularly poetry. This
is the area in which Fish has taught and published the most, beginning with his dissertation on the poet John Skelton, and
continuing through his earliest book publications--including
John Skelton's Poetry (1965),
Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967),
Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (1972), and
The Living Temple : George Herbert and Catechizing (1978)--to his latest collection of essays,
How Milton Works (2001).
From 1980 onwards, with the publication of
Is There a Text in This Class?
The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Stanley Fish's work took a much more explicitly theoretical turn. He is frequently acknowledged as one of the founders
of reader-response criticism, a reference to his work beginning in the 1970s. The question of interpretation has been central
to his scholarly interests, from early reader-response work focusing on the text, to a more reader-centered position and the
theory of interpretive communities, to the problem of theorizing interpretation in legal studies.
Note: Much of the information in this summary of Stanley Fish's work was drawn from an article on Fish by Reed Way Dasenbrock
in
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
| 1938 | Born April 19 in Providence, Rhode Island. |
| 1959 | B.A., University of Pennsylvania. |
| 1960 | M.A., Yale University. |
| 1962 | Ph.D., Yale University (dissertation: The Poetry of Awareness: A Reassessment of John Skelton). |
| 1962-1963 | Instructor, University of California, Berkeley. |
| 1963-1967 | Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley. |
| 1965 | John Skelton's Poetry (Yale University Press). |
| 1967 | Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Macmillan/St. Martin's); reprinted, with a new preface and appendix, 1971 (University of California Press); second edition, 1997 (Harvard University Press). |
| 1967 | Visiting Associate Professor, Washington University. |
| 1967-1970 | Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley. |
| 1969-1970 | Guggenheim Fellowship. |
| 1970-1974 | Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley. |
| 1971 | Editor, Seventeenth Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism (Oxford University Press). |
| 1971 | Visiting Professor, Johns Hopkins University. |
| 1971 | Visiting Professor, Linguistics Institute, State University of New York, Buffalo. |
| 1972 | Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (University of California Press). |
| 1973-1974 | Visiting Bing Professor of English, University of Southern California. |
| 1974-1978 | Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University. |
| 1976-1985 | Adjunct Professor, University of Maryland Law School. |
| 1978 | The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (University of California Press). |
| 1978-1985 | William Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Humanities, Johns Hopkins University. |
| 1980 | Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Harvard University Press). |
| 1983-1984 | Visiting Professor, Columbia University. |
| 1983-1985 | Chairman, Department of English, Johns Hopkins University. |
| 1985-1998 | Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law, Duke University. |
| 1986-1992 | Chairman, Department of English, Duke University. |
| 1989 | Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Duke University Press). |
| 1989 | Fellow, Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine. |
| 1993-1998 | Executive Director, Duke University Press. |
| 1994 | There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too (Oxford University Press). |
| 1995 | Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Oxford University Press). |
| 1995 | Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow, Center for Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside. |
| 1995 | Adjunct Professor of Law, Columbia University. |
| 1999 | The Trouble with Principle (Harvard University Press). |
| 1999- | Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Professor of English and Criminal Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago. |
| 2001 | How Milton Works (Harvard University Press). |
Scope and Content of Collection
This collection documents Stanley Fish's professional career as a literary theorist and academic. Materials are largely textual--including
primarily drafts of his writings, publications, and clippings and photocopies for teaching and research purposes--and range
in coverage from his early student work to his most recent professional activities and publications. The collection also
includes a limited amount of correspondence and many audio recordings, the latter of which document his activities as a public
intellectual and teacher. Although each period of Fish's career is represented in collection materials, documentation from
his time at Duke University is strongest. Materials documenting his activity as an administrator--department chair at Johns
Hopkins and Duke, executive director of Duke Univeristy Press, and dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago--are very
limited.
The collection is arranged in 8 series.
- Series 1. Biographical material, 1954-1998. 1.2 linear ft.
- Series 2. Student work, 1955-1964 . 2.6 linear ft.
- Series 3. Writings, 1941-2001. 30.5 linear ft.
- Series 4. Teaching files, 1962-1998. 2.1 linear ft.
- Series 5. Professional activities, 1971-1997. 3.3 linear ft.
- Series 6. Correspondence, 1962-1997. 1.7 linear ft.
- Series 7. Research files, 1921-circa 2000 . 16 linear ft.
- Series 8. Audio and video recordings, 1970-1997. 6.8 linear ft.