Stanley Fish, whose approach to theories of how we interpret literature has been both widely accepted and criticized, in his essay "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" (1980), recounts an experiment in which he lists the names of several linguists vertically on a blackboard and tells several students who were studying religious poetry that the list is a poem. The students promptly begin decoding the meaning of the poem, using their ideas about religious poems to create poetic meaning from a list of names.
One of Fish's conclusions from this experiment—an experiment he says that he duplicated several times at other schools and in other countries‚is that
it is not the presence of poetic qualities [that] compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.
Although the experiment itself—telling his students the...
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list is a poem—may have been slightly tainted, his conclusion was startling at the time: a poem is only a poem if it is perceived as such by the reader, and readers, in effect, create meaning based on their expectations of how a poem conveys its meaning.
His most interesting conclusions follow from that observation. Skilled readers, because they know beforehand generally what to expect from a poem, will, in Billy Collins's words, beat the poem with a hose until it yields its meaning. In Fisher's words, readers do not analyze the meaning that inheres in a poem:
Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters to do not decode poems; they make them.
This, of course, takes reader-response criticism to a new level because, in its widest application, it implies that there can be no "agreed upon" elements of meaning that are recognized by more than one reader. He argues further that this individual construction of meaning results in "no bedrock of level of objectivity," by which he means no objective meaning.
He modifies this conclusion by arguing that individual readers are, by virtue of living within a society, subject to community expectations, and these expectations are framed by conventional, communal, ideas:
the 'you' who does the interpretive work that puts poems and assignments and lists into the world is a communal you and not an isolated individual.
The logical extension of this point is that, despite the individual's construction of idiosyncratic meaning, his or her social construct is shared by others and therefore some level of commonality in interpretation is possible. In short, meaning can be a shared construct if expectations are shared:
the meanings it [an individual] confers on texts are not its own but have their source in the interpretive community.
The "interpretive community," then, works to moderate the effect of interpretation limited by individual expectations of meaning, thereby opening up a route to common discourse about an inherently individual experience.
If, as Fish argues at the conclusion, multiple readers share the same "interpretive principles," then their interpretations may agree in material respects. This agreement will not be driven by preconceived notions of what the text must mean but by individual, and sometimes shared, experience and expectations derived from that experience.