SOURCE: A review of Professional Correctness, in Modern Language Review, Vol. 93, No. 1, January, 1998, pp. 149-50.

In the following review of Professional Correctness, Connor finds fault in Fish's pat conclusions and unwillingness to recognize ambiguity.

This book, [Professional Correctness] which is a revised and expanded version of the Clarendon Lectures that Stanley Fish gave at Oxford in 1993, is directed against the ideal of interdisciplinarity at large in literary studies and the humanities and, more narrowly, the promise often held out by those who urge this ideal, that breaking out of narrow disciplinary assumptions will allow literary and cultural criticism to achieve a kind of political effectiveness that is presently denied to them. Fish ranges against such ideas objections of two slightly contrasting kinds. Firstly and more pragmatically, the realms of politics and of literary criticism are so distanced from and asymmetrically disposed towards each other that the chances of...