Product Description: A lively and accessible guide to understanding rhetoric by the world class English and Law professor and bestselling author of How to Write a SentenceFilled with the wit and observational prowess that shaped Stanley Fish's acclaimed bestseller How to Write a Sentence, Winning Arguments guides listeners through the "greatest hits" of rhetoric...read more

Product Description: A lively and accessible guide to understanding rhetoric by the world class English and Law professor and bestselling author of How to Write a SentenceFilled with the wit and observational prowess that shaped Stanley Fish's acclaimed bestseller How to Write a Sentence, Winning Arguments guides listeners through the ''greatest hits'' of rhetoric...read more

Spend the holidays with Stanley Fish and John Milton!

What should be the role of our institutions of higher education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce responsible citizens?In Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues that, however laudable these goals might be, there is but one proper role for the academe in society: to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. And yet professors now routinely bring their political views into the classroom and seek to influence the political views of their students. Those who do this will often invoke academic freedom, but Fish argues that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that comes into the professor's mind. He insists that a professor's only obligation is "to present the material in the syllabus and introduce students to state-of-the-art methods of analysis. Not to practice politics, but to study it; not to proselytize for or against religious doctrines, but to describe them; not to affirm or condemn Intelligent Design, but to explain what it is and analyze its appeal."Given that hot-button issues such as Holocaust denial, free speech, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are regularly debated in classrooms across the nation, Save the World On Your Own Time is certain to spark fresh debate-and to incense both liberals and conservatives-about the true purpose of higher education in America.

Product Description: An intensive examination of the theoretical writings of cultural and literary critic Stanley Fish.

Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, set a new standard for Milton criticism and established its author as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time. How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern of Fish's book, which explores the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value. Encountering the great poet on his own terms, engaging his equally distinguished admirers and detractors, this book moves a 300-year debate about the significance of Milton's verse to a new level.

Product Description: Stanley Fish is an equal opportunity antagonist. A theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right, Fish here turns with customary gusto to the trouble with principle...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The discipline of literary criticism is strictly defined, and the most pressing issues of our time―racism, violence against women and homosexuals, cultural imperialism, and the like―are located outside its domain. In Professional Correctness, Stanley Fish raises a provocative challenge to those who try to turn literary studies into an instrument of political change, arguing that when literary critics try to influence society at large by addressing social and political issues, they cease to be literary critics at all...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Stanley Fish Reader assembles for the first time the best work of this brightest intellectual light. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The foremost theoretical statement and practical criticism of seventeenth century texts from the standpoint of reader response (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin argues here that Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are and therefore the fact of their divided responses makes perfect sense. (view table of contents)

In a collection of essays written for a series of debates with Dinesh D'Souza, the author takes on conservatives, liberals, and complacent middle-of-the-roaders in auguments about law, politics, academia, and more

Product Description: In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In Doing What Comes Naturally, Stanley Fish refuses the dilemma posed by this question and argues that while we can never separate our judgments from the contexts in which they are made, those judgments are nevertheless authoritative and even, in the only way that matters, objective...read more

Essays reexamine the fundamental assumptions of literary criticism, and the debate about interpretation, and offer a fresh approach to thinking about literature

Essays reexamine the fundamental assumptions of literary criticism, and the debate about interpretation, and offer a fresh approach to thinking about literature

Product Description: The foremost theoretical statement and practical criticism of seventeenth century texts from the standpoint of reader response