SOURCE: Fish, Stanley. “What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?” In Is There A Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities, pp. 338-55. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.

In the following essay, Fish expounds on the view that each interpretation of a literary text is colored by the reader's response to the text and that the only possible solution in trying to understand or counter-act an argument regarding a text is to present opposing points of view on it.

Last time I ended by suggesting that the fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members (also and simultaneously constituted) can then agree. This account of agreement has the additional advantage of providing what the objectivist argument cannot supply, a coherent account of disagreement. To...