Writing to Provoke

Abstract

As much as anyone in literary studies, Stanley Fish has taken seriously the injunction to be a public intellectual. Back in the early 1990s he debated Dinesh D’Souza in a large number of venues, on questions of education, political correctness, affirmative action, changes in the literary canon, and other subjects of controversy, in a road show where the attraction was opposing contrarians. Since then he has continued to write essays for nonacademic publication, and Save the World on Your Own Time is a distillation of such op-ed pieces and public pronouncements. Now often when we think of public intellectuals, we imagine someone who mediates between the academy and the general public, explaining academic discoveries to a lay public in terms that they can comprehend: Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, or Brian Greene. Another version is the intellectual who operates outside the academy and pronounces judiciously on a range of public issues: Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre are illustrious predecessors, but we can also think of Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, Cornell West, and perhaps Umberto Eco. But Fish has pioneered a different role—the role of public intellectual as provocateur—where the goal is not to explain work in a recondite academic specialty or to propound judiciously on questions of public moment but to provoke, to offer arguments that will irritate and prompt discussion. In this new role, it is not a matter of taking sides in an ongoing controversy—strategically, to promote the side you favor, trying to win