Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities. […] Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.
Let's say you're sitting at home one day reading Shakespeare's Hamlet. But you're not just doing that. You also happen to be sitting in front of your laptop glancing up every two minutes to check your Facebook newsfeed. At the same time, your phone's buzzing, and you're texting with a friend, and you're trying to make dinner plans.
Yeah, if you're doing all that stuff while trying to read Hamlet, you're probably not going to get much out of it. Can you really understand the use of language, the themes and motifs that are popping up, or the structure of the play if you're worrying about all this stuff at once? Probably not.
But if you lock yourself in a quiet room, shut down your laptop, clear your desk, put your phone on silent, and just sit there and read Hamlet really closely, you'll probably get a whole lot out of it. You'll find things in the play—images, symbols, themes—that you wouldn't find if you weren't paying close attention.
Basically, Hamlet is only as great as the attention you pay to it. Those words on the page are just ink unless you, the reader, decide to make them more than that.
Quote :"Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" Quote 1
[The] method [is] rather simple in concept, but complex (or at least complicated) in execution. The concept is simply the rigorous and disinterested asking of the question, what does this word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter, novel, play, poem, do?; and the execution involves an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time.
Words on a page don't just sit there: when we read them, they do something to us. They might make us laugh. They might make us angry. They might make us cry. They might confuse the heck out of us.
Okay, well, that's all great, but in order for words to evoke all of these crazy different reactions, there needs to be a reader reading them. In order to understand what the words are doing, we need to understand what we, as readers, are feeling and thinking when we read those words. A critic's job is to analyze how a reader responds to words as they unfold in sentences.
Stanley Fish is asking a whole lot of us here. Does he seriously want us to sit there and analyze how we respond to each word that we read?
Yup.
Well, Fish thinks it's totally worth the effort. We'll take his word for it. Word by word by word by word.
Quote :"Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" Quote 2
[T]he value of such a procedure is predicated on the idea of meaning as an event, something that is happening between the words and in the reader's mind, something not visible to the naked eyes, but which can be made visible (or at least palpable) by the regular introduction of a "searching" question (what does this do?). It is more usual to assume that meaning is a function of the utterance, and to equate it with the information given (the message) or the attitude expressed. That is, the components of an utterance are considered either in relation to each other or to a state of affairs in the outside world, or to the state of mind of the speaker-author. In any and all of these variations, meaning is located (presumed to be embedded) in the utterance, and the apprehension of meaning is an act of extraction. In short, there is little sense of process and even less of the reader's actualizing participation in that process.
Traditionally, we tend to think of meaning as something embedded in the words on a page. In this view we readers have to find or extract that meaning. But according to Fish, meaning isn't just sitting there on a page. Meaning happens, and it only happens when a reader interacts with a text and participates in making meaning.
Basically, Fish thinks that meaning is something that exists between the words on the page and the reader's mind. It's not totally in the text, and it's not something the reader totally makes up, but it's a sort of creative engagement between the two.