Julie Stone Peters in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Feisty contrarian Stanley Fish has served us for decades as the public intellectual people love to hate. Feminist social critic Camille Paglia famously described him as “a totalitarian Tinkerbell.” Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton said he was “the Donald Trump of American academia, a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect who pushes his ideas in the conceptual marketplace with all the fervour with which others peddle second-hand Hoovers.” A brilliant scholar of late medieval and Renaissance poetry, he came to prominence in the 1980s for his claim that “interpretive communities” determine how you interpret a text—a theory that offered liberal legal scholars an alternative to the rigid originalism and textualism of the conservative Rehnquist Supreme Court. Teaching at prestigious law schools (while secretly working toward a night school law degree), he began writing for public venues. The New York Times eventually gave him a syndicated column, where he opined on everything from the decline of the humanities to Hillary-hating and stepping on Jesus (on a scrap of paper). Both on lecture tours and in print, he has fought with all comers: conservative justice Antonin Scalia, liberal rights theorists Ronald Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum, radical law professor Duncan Kennedy.
At age 86, Fish is still at it. A heretic of the left, he still loves pillorying liberal pieties.
More here.
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