SOURCE: “Doing Something Different,” in London Review of Books, July 27, 1989, pp. 20-2.

In the following review of Doing What Comes Naturally, Ellis finds logical fallacies in Fish's argument and disapproves of his alignment with certain fashionable schools of contemporary criticism.

Before Stanley Fish started doing what comes naturally he wrote standard works of literary criticism which dealt, as most such books do, with particular literary figures and periods. Then, in 1980, he published his first volume devoted to theory of criticism, Is There a Text in This Class?, a collection of his essays from the Seventies. Doing What Comes Naturally is Fish’s second volume of theory, but while this, too, is a collection of his essays from the previous decade, it is quite different in important respects. Is There a Text was devoted to a single issue in theory-reader-oriented criticism—and the sequence of the essays chronicled Fish...