about Fish

A certain word came to my mind as soon as I started reading Fish’s article, and that was, “socially constructed.” I remember feeling as though I’ve been tricked all these time when I had first learnt the meaning of that very word.

Fish’s argument that it is not that the literary piece itself is, for instance, a poem, in its original sense but that it is we, or should I say, a certain mindset that makes what they are. “Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them,” said Fish, while Eagleton shed a light on similar topic by mentioning, “There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it. ‘Value’ is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in certain specific situations, according to particular criteria…”

There is a stained glass that stands between our naked eyes and a strange object, for example, and that object can be transformed into anything according to what we see through the glass.

Unlike chandler’s words that ‘Genres are mediating frameworks between texts, makers and interpreters,’ the notion of genre seems to not mediate, but rather, impose an idea of what we see is supposed to be or have, when it is predisposed.