Fish, Stanley (1938—)
American literary theorist and cultural critic. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Fish studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke Universities, the University of Illinois, and Florida International University. Fish began his career as a Milton scholar and has written a number of highly regarded books on that subject. In critical theory he is best known for the concept of the interpretive community, which displaces the problem of how meaning is produced onto society itself and makes meaning the practical production of readers rather than texts. Fish is a high-profile cultural commentator who writes columns for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, generally taking a counter-intuitive view of things. For instance, he has famously argued that the humanities have no use and that is a good thing, and that political correctness is a waste of time. flâneur A psycho-social type emblematic of modernity. The essentially untranslatable term was introduced into the critical theory vocabulary by German cultural critic Benjamin, Walter in his uncompleted posthumously published Das Passagen-Werk (1982), translated as The Arcades Project (1999). Adapting the term ‘flâneur’ from the work of French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, especially his essay ‘Peintre de la vie moderne’ (1863), translated as ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1964), Benjamin uses it to theorize the emergence of what would later be called consumer society, i.e. a society in which practices of consumption rather than production are predominant. Belonging neither to the poorest class nor the wealthiest class, the flâneur existed on the margin of both the city and the bourgeoisie, consuming images of both as a spectacle or phantasmagoria. Cultural Studies uses the concept of the flâneur to theorize the experience of consuming the built environment for itself, particularly the space of shopping malls. The most influential work on the flâneur is still Benjamin’s posthumously published Charles Baudelaire, Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (1969), translated as Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973). But important and more contemporary adaptations are also to be found in John Fiske’s Popular Culture and Everyday Life (1988) and Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping (1985). See also everyday life; practices; society of the spectacle; space. Further Reading: S. Buck-Morss The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989). K. Tester The Flâneur (1994).