It is a great...pleasure these days to find a critic willing to discuss language, literature, reading, writing, and the community of readers on the understanding that the reader plays a real part in the production of his experience.
   --Denis Donoghue, Times Literary Supplement

No bare summary of his conclusions can do justice to the brilliance of his analyses...Is There a Text in This Class? is a substantial achievement which deserves the serious consideration of all students of literature. Its arguments are cogent, forceful and engaging, its style witty, personable and unpretentious, and its analyses are just, incisive and economical. Most important, the theory it advocates is provocative, comprehensive and, I believe, true.
   --Criticism

These essays demonstrate why Fish has become the center--as both source and focus--of so much intellectual energy in contemporary American critical theory. For brilliance and forcefulness in argumentation and for sheer boldness of mind and spirit, he has no match.
   --Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Stanley Fish is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His many books include There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too.

Read More by Stanley Fish:

• The Trouble with Principle
• Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change
• Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, Second Edition, With a New Preface by the Author
• How Milton Works