Keeping Up with the Fishes Robert T. Tally Jr. (bio) Stanley Fish, America's Enfant Terrible: The Authorized Biography Gary A. Olson Southern Illinois University Press www.siupress.com/books/978-0-8093-3476-6 192 Pages; Print, $32.50 A historian of twentieth-century celebrity culture might include in a footnote the curious emergence, brief duration, and inauspicious decline of a "star system" in academic literary studies in last quarter of the century. The recent publication of an authorized biography of Stanley Fish, who was among the best known of those stars in the brave o'er-hanging firmament of higher education in the 1980s and 1990s, offers an occasion to reflect upon this strange moment in modern literary studies. After all, Fish was not merely one among many stars at the time, but he also developed a persona as well as a critical theory that actively fueled this sort of academic glamour, decadence, and celebrity in literary studies at the time. In his fascinating study of the rise, spread, and ultimate decline of "French theory" in America (French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States [2003 orig.; 2008]), François Cusset identified the emergence of "academic stars" as one of the more striking side-effects of the phenomenon, but he also noted that these "stars" became better known for their roles in the "star system" than for their own writings or ideas. Thus, for example, "scores of Americans have heard of Stanley Fish's car collection, Cornel West's salary, Stephen Greenblatt's circle of friends, Donna Haraway's provocative wardrobe, and queer theorist Eve Sedgwick's late conversion to Buddhism before—and, also, all too often instead of—knowing their academic works." Note that Cusset says "scores," not hundreds or thousands; after all, the academic star system and its audience of stargazers was not particularly vast. Among such stars as Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Edward Said, Richard Rorty, and Fredric Jameson, Fish stands out for a couple of reasons: first, because he became perhaps the most famous, appearing in well-publicized debates, writing a regular online column for the New York Times, and generally making himself known to an audience far beyond that found in either Milton Studies or academe more generally; but second, because—unlike some of other "public intellectuals" (Said, Gates, West, and so on)—Fish develops a theory and practice more or less designed to celebrate celebrity. Becoming a "star" was one of Fish's professional aims, as Olson's "authorized biography" of him makes clear. One might even go so far as to say that, if there were not a star system for him to join, he'd have had to invent one. One might even say that he did. In Stanley Fish, America's Enfant Terrible, Olson endeavors to tell a Horatio Alger story of Fish's rise to fame and fortune, and in this tale, Fish's insatiable desire for both renown and the remuneration that frequently comes with it provides the backbone of the narrative. We learn early on that a "working-class kid" from Providence, Rhode Island, vowed that "he would one day become the highest-paid English professor in the nation—which essentially meant the entire world. He would achieve that goal." Olson follows Fish from his elite prep school to an Ivy League education, then to ever more lucrative positions at such institutions as Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Olson takes care to note how canny Fish is in parlaying campus visits and public lectures into lucrative tenured positions. According to Olson, "whatever he was offered by a university, he would demand more—and he usually got it." For over fifty years, Fish has been without question a gifted teacher, a productive scholar, and a diligent provider of service to his departments, universities, and the professional at large. Yet this is not enough for Olson. Beyond being a mere literature professor and academic administrator, Fish comes off as a tabloid celebrity, a national "star," in this account. There is a certain puckish...
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Feb 3, 2018
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