SOURCE: “Culture and Anarchy,” in The New Republic, February 14, 1981, pp. 36-8.

In the following review of Is There a Text in This Class?, Graff provides an overview of Fish's critical perspective and exposes fundamental logical flaws in his assertions about the nature of perception and social communication.

One day in 1971, Professor Stanley Fish tried an experiment in one of his literature classes. Pointing to a random list of names on the blackboard left over from a previous class, Fish told the students “that what they saw on the blackboard was a religious poem of the kind they had been studying,” and he asked them to interpret it. Immediately, he reports, the students began to find intricate allegorical meanings in this “text.” For example, the name “Ohmann” at the end of the list was seen as representing “omen,” “Oh Man,” “amen,” and so forth.

Now one might think this...