Collecting and Categorizing Thought

Stanley Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem” and Daniel Chandler’s genre theories recognize the psychological concept of schemas, which are mental frameworks with which we interpret literature and the world at large.

Fish does not tackle the specific characteristics of poetry but rather the idea that forms of literature are distinguishable as “a result of the different interpretive operations we perform” and not their individual qualities. He relates an anecdote to illustrate this concept. His poetry students gave a religious analysis of a text, which was actually a list of names from an assignment he’d given a previous class. According to Fish, the students interpreted the text using the techniques they had been taught because they expected a poem.

Chandler’s genre studies interpret genre as both a framework for readers to understand and operate in, as well as a “contract between authors and readers.” Because readers have expectations about particular genres just as the students did about text in a poetry class, genre “constrains the possible ways in which a text is interpreted, guiding readers of a text towards a preferred reading which is normally in accordance with the dominant ideology.” In this way, categorizing literature into different genres places limitations on the readers’ analysis of the text.


Fish’s beliefs support this notion. He says that “the poems and assignments we see are the products of social and cultural patterns of thought.” In order for readers to interpret material, they must have a point of reference. There are many points of reference which we take for granted as inherent, but in reality all knowledge is learned. He goes so far as to suggest that nothing we create or interpret is our own, rather belonging to the societal collective in which we have been educated and conditioned to certain social norms.

Just as Chandler views genre as a contract between those who create it and those who consume it, Fish says that the meaning of literature and even social interactions comes from those who create them. Fish provides an anecdote about a student raising his hand in class. His other students knew that their classmate wished to ask permission to speak, and although they cannot remember learning this behavior, the classroom environment conditioned it. We learn behavior from observation. Examples from every day life where the social expectations and conventions are critical to interpreting interaction are boundless. Even a small child understands that a finger pressed to the lips means ‘be silent,’ but who remembers being taught this signal?

Fish and Chandler’s theories view understanding as a collective. Fish quotes Sack as saying “a culture fills brains so that they are all alike in fine detail.” Terry Eagleton provides some hope for individual thought in Literary Theory: An Introduction by citing Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, written in 1821 relaying a message “which is radically at odds with the utilitarian ideology of early capitalist England.” This seems to counter Chandler’s argument of genre because it proves that literature can inform against dominating belief systems, but even the recognition that the book is anti-capitalist is only possible when readers understand the framework of capitalism as a point of reference, and even being against the dominant ideology is a form of an “interpretive community.”