SOURCE: A review of Doing What Comes Naturally, in MLN, Vol. 104, No. 5, December, 1989, pp. 1189-91.

In the following review, Donoghue offers a positive assessment of Doing What Comes Naturally.

Stanley Fish states that Doing What Comes Naturally “reduces to an argument in which the troubles and benefits of interpretive theory are made to disappear in the solvent of an enriched notion of practice” (viii). In dismissing the premise, still powerful in mainstream American literary studies, that what we do with any given text must be accountable to some general theory of interpretation, Fish sets himself an extremely ambitious task. In order to succeed, he must identify and account for phenomena and processes that, in every instance, resist general definition (indeed such terms as “phenomena” and “processes” misleadingly formalize the concept of practice employed in this book). In my opinion, he succeeds completely. Drawing from fields as diverse as...