Stanley Fish Biography

Stanley Fish

American literary theorist known for his writings about the role of the reader in literature. After receiving his Ph.D. in English literature from Yale (1962), Fish has taught at U.C. Berkeley (1966–69), Johns Hopkins University (1974–15), and Duke University. His treatise Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost and the books Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972) and Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980) are among his most significant contributions to the field.