Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric (review)

Abstract

Justifying Belief is a concise synthesis of Stanley Fish's recent work on nonliterary topics and, as such, clarifies some of Fish's more contentious discussions on topics such as the interpretation of legal discourse, the disciplinarity of English studies, and the role of rhetoric in belief systems. Olson handles these topics adroitly in the first three chapters; the book also contains two in-depth scholarly interviews with Fish by Olson, an illuminating foreword by Fish himself (an autobiographical narrative that traces his development of thought), an afterword by J. Hillis Miller, and a comprehensive bibliography of Fish's writings. This book is an impressive introduction to Fish's work and remarkable for how Olson links the arguments that Fish has been making for the last few years to the various issues to which he has been applying them. Olson, in addition, is careful to contextualize the debates concerning Fish's ideas—important because, as a major outspoken intellectual, Fish certainly has his admirers and critics: as Olson says in his Introduction, "There simply is no such thing as a tepid response to Fish's work" (2002, 2). [End Page 196]