Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric

Front Cover
SUNY Press, Aug 15, 2002 - Literary Criticism - 178 pages
While Stanley Fish has exerted immense influence on the study of seventeenth-century poetry and prose, his most widely read works--and perhaps his most important--are his nonliterary writings. In Justifying Belief, Gary Olson examines Fish's nonliterary work and explains that what unites Fish's interventions in so many seemingly disparate areas of inquiry is his belief in the centrality of rhetoric. Whether he is discussing how disciplines conduct their work, how political positions triumph, or how practice always derives from specific situations despite the grandiose theories employed to justify them, Fish consistently turns to the specific local, contingent context--to the rhetorical situation at play--to explain how something works. For Fish, people "understand" or are "persuaded" by a position because it fits into the structure of beliefs already in play, not because they have been swayed by the "reasonableness" of someone's argument; they then pursue the available means of support to justify that belief rhetorically, both to themselves and to others. Olson demonstrates that this strong relationship between rhetoric and belief is the intellectual foundation of much of Fish's work. Justifying Belief includes a comprehensive bibliography of Fish's works, an Afterword by J. Hillis Miller, and a Foreword by Fish himself.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
1
Public Intellectuals and the Discipline of English Studies
7
No Loss No Gain The Argument against Principle
35
The Story of Rhetoric Constructing the Ground Upon Which You Confidently Walk
63
Fish Tales A Conversation with The Contemporary Sophist
85
From Multiculturalism to Academic Freedom The Case against Universalism
115
Afterword
141
Notes
149
Works Cited
155
The Works of Stanley Fish
159
Index
175
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2002)

Gary A. Olson is Professor of English at the University of South Florida and coeditor (with Lynn Worsham) of Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial, also published by SUNY Press.

Bibliographic information