“Is There a Text in This Class?” Annotation and reflection
Emily Newberry
In this reading, Stanley Fish creates a fictional example of one of his colleagues and the colleague’s student that have a literary misunderstanding with each other over a simple question. The question that was asked and misunderstood was when the student said, “Is there a text in this class?” The teacher simply replied with “Yes; it’s the Norton Anthology of Literature.” Referring to a class textbook. What had just happened was clear miscommunication between the two because the student never was referring to an actual textbook, but rather if there would be a belief in poems and literature in the classroom or not. In the rest of Stanley’s article his main point that he is conveying is…show more content… Stanley states that word’s meanings are often not determined by their context, but they already have a predetermined meaning to each person based on the context that the person associates that word with. Everyone who either hears or sees texts or words today has to first comprehend the content, and then based on what they just encountered give it their own meaning based on what they understood. The entire purpose of this article is for Stanley to explain to people that “There are no determinate meanings and that the stability of the text is an illusion.” (Fish 579) That means that no word has just one meaning and one interpretation; people give all the words meaning depending on how they interpret them when spoken to them or read. He illustrates all of this by simply giving the readers this example of a student asking her teacher if there is a text in the
