LAW & LITERATURE WORKSHOP
presents
Stanley Fish
Florida International University
The Intentional Thesis Once More
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
Abstract: In the areas of both law and literature, the question What is the meaning of a text? is perpetually debated. In general, three answers have been given to this question. A text means what its words, considered in relation to standard dictionary usage, say. This is known as the textualist position. A second answer to the question is that a text means what its authoritative interpreters say it means. So it is often remarked that the Constitution means what ever the members of the Supreme Court determine at a particular time. The third answer is that a text means what its author or authors intend. My argument is that the third answer is correct and that the other two answer are for different reasons incoherent. I also argue that the intentionalist account of interpretation has no methodological consequences and does not amount to a theory of interpretation, in part because interpretation is an empirical, not a theoretical activity.
Stanley Fish is Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at the Florida International University College of Law. Professor Fish previously served as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (1959) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University (1960; 1962). He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley (1962-74); Johns Hopkins University (1974-85), where he was the Kenan Professor of English and Humanities; and Duke University, where he was Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law (1986-1998). From 1993 through 1998 he served as Executive Director of Duke University Press.
In addition to being one of the leading public intellectuals in the United States, Professor Fish is a prolific author whose works include over 200 scholarly publications and books. He has published articles in the Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Texas Law Review. His books include John Skelton's Poetry (1965); Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967) and a Thirtieth Anniversary Edition (1997); Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (1972); The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (1978); Is there a Text in This Class? Interpretive Communities and the Sources of Authority (1980); Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989); There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too (1994); Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995); The Trouble with Principle (1999); and How Milton Works (2001). The Stanley Fish Reader, edited by H. Aram Veeser, was published in 1999.
Professor Fish's previous writings on intention include "The Law Wishes to Have a Formal Existence," in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too; "Consequences," in WJT Mitchell, ed., Against Theory; and "With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida," 8 Critical Inquiry (1982): 693-721 (all reprinted in The Stanley Fish Reader).
For more infomation, contact Prof. Simon Stern @ simon.stern@utoronto.ca
