Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fishis an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 April 1938
CountryUnited States of America
Stanley Fish quotes about
This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.
The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'
We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.
Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.
Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.
The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows.
It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.
I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.
People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.
The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,..
No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.
Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?
Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.