SOURCE: Juhl, P. D. “Stanley Fish's Interpretive Communities and the Status of Critical Interpretations.” In Comparative Criticism, edited by E. S. Shaffer, pp. 47-58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

In the following essay, Juhl counters Fish's theory of interpretation, which proposes that each textual reading is affected by the interpretive community to which that reader belongs, and instead notes that literary interpretations can, indeed, be objectively evaluated.

I. Introduction

Over the last decade Stanley Fish has developed a theory of interpretation which is in effect a new version of the hermeneutic circle. In the following, I shall offer a few considerations in support of the view that this new version of the hermeneutic circle is no more convincing than the old. If I am right, then these considerations provide evidence that literary interpretations can, at least in principle, be objectively confirmed or disconfirmed.

On Fish's view, what a ‘text...