SOURCE: “Johnny One-Note,” in The American Scholar, Vol. 60, No. 4, Autumn, 1991, pp. 608-13.

In the following review of Doing What Comes Naturally, Neth commends the scope and ambition of Fish's writings, but objects to his “self-fulfilling” assertions and “disingenuous” motivations.

Stanley Fish’s intellectual ingenuity and argumentative rigor were established in his previous books, Surprised by Sin (his controversial study of Paradise Lost, published in 1967) and its sequel, Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972), and in his first full-length incursion into the arcane realm of literary theory, the collection of essays that Fish, with the interrogative irony and critical hyper-self-consciousness that have become his trademarks, characteristically entitled Is There a Text in This Class? (1980). The common thread running through these earlier works is Fish’s conviction that literary texts are always and unavoidably interpreted from a finite, contingent perspective, that there is no such thing as a definitive interpretation based on the text...