EN 466 LITERARY THEORY
STUDY QUESTIONS FOR STANLEY FISH

1. What does Fish mean by signification?
2. What does Fish see as the inevitable result of Formalist analysis? How does Fish shift the responsibility for interpretation?
3. What does Fish’s approach have in common with a New Critical analysis of Milton’s sonnets? What different conclusions does it reach?
4. What is the difference for Fish between a temporal perspective and a spatial perspective on a text?
5. For fish, what are the 2 senses in which a reader "realizes" an author’s intentions?
6. What are "conditions of utterance"?
7. How does interpretation create intention for Fish?
8. How does the notion of an interpretative community explain both the stability of interpretation among different readers and differing interpretations by the same reader?

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