SOURCE: A review of Is There a Text in This Class?, in Modern Philology, Vol. 80, No. 1, August, 1982, pp. 113-16.

In the following review of Is There a Text in This Class?, Yu provides an overview of Fish's critical perspective and commends his “charm, wit, and acumen” but dismisses his elaborate defense of a “lopsided thesis.”

To the question posed by the title of this book, its author has provided the most succinct answer at the outset. “There isn’t a text in this or any other class if one means by text what E. D. Hirsch and others mean by it, ‘an entity which always remains the same from one moment to the next’ (Validity in Interpretation, p. 46); but there is a text in this and every class if one means by text the structure of meanings that is obvious and inescapable from the perspective of whatever interpretive...