entirely with those communities—authors are essentially irrelevant. Fish’s
contention is persuasive only if the crucial assumption underlying it can be
sustained, the assumption that texts do not provide resistance or recalcitrance
to our interpretive efforts but instead are always amenable to the strategies
of any interpretive community. I contend that the assumption cannot be sus-
tained once we look more closely than Fish does at the nature of interpretation
and the means by which we test interpretive hypotheses. Fish tests interpre-
tive hypotheses only by seeking to confirm them, but such confirmation is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for establishing the soundness of an
interpretation. It is not until we seek to disconfirm hypotheses by comparing
them to alternatives that our testing becomes sufficient.
In “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” Fish makes his larger
case about the power of interpretive communities by telling a story that he
regards as a particularly telling example of that power. When he asked the stu-
dents in his seventeenth-century poetry class to interpret a list of authors he’d
assigned to his previous class on stylistics, they were able to give a plausible
account of the list as a religious poem. But the story only demonstrates a far
less radical finding: those trained in allegorical interpretation can apply what
they’ve learned to a list of names. If we shift from asking whether it is possible
to interpret the list as a religious poem to asking whether the hypothesis that it
is a poem is stronger than the hypothesis that it is a reading assignment, then
everything changes. (Note that this shift is not a shift from one interpretive
community to another but rather to a meta-interpretive inquiry: is it possible
to choose between hypotheses generated by two different interpretive commu-
nities, that of the class in stylistics and that of the class in religious poetry?)
The assignment hypothesis meets with no recalcitrance—it can account for
all the textual details precisely and coherently—while the poem hypothesis, as
Fish himself admits, has difficulty with one of the names (Hayes), and it offers
a much looser fit between the textual details and the overall interpretation.
In this way, Fish’s own example ends up providing strong support for the
position that although our view of texts is mediated by our interpretive frame-
works, texts have an existence independent of those frameworks. This posi-
tion, in turn, provides the warrant for rhetorical theory’s inquiry into why
texts have one set of properties rather than another and to seek the answer in
a hypothesis about the intentionality that governs their shape and supports
their communicative purposes.
With Anglo-American deconstruction, the key issue is less the sustainabil-
ity of the position’s claims about the language of literary texts and more the
consequences that follow from those claims. This version of deconstruction is
a viable position to the extent that it is a response to one worthwhile question
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