Is There a Text In This Class?

I find myself constantly returning to the library here on campus.

I even find myself wandering off into the aisles during study times looking for books I haven't seen before. There are many I'd love to digest. Sometimes, I wish I could embrace everything in a library at once and dance around for a while in a world ruled by sentences. But I can only spend so much time in the library. And, I'm but human.

However, I did find something of interest today that I kind of just stumbled upon. I'm referring to Stanley Fish's Is There A Text In This Class? I've only scratched the Introduction. But my feel is that, similar to the impact Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions made within Philosophy of Science, Fish's book is an important contribution to the Literary Theory field. I'm excited to engage the book.

If I've noticed anything, though, it's that library resources vary greatly. Calvin students, I think, don't often realize the extent to which the Hekman library is poised and ready with a startlingly large amount of resource material. Any complaints about Hekman I've made in the past I feel like I ought to take back seven-fold. There are good acquisition librarians out there! And, Calvin is fortunate to have a top-notch staff working hard to provide students with great resources.

Libraries are great.

"if meaning is embedded in the text, the reader's responsibilities are limited to the job of getting it out; but if its meaning develops, and if it develops in a dynamic relationship with the reader's expectations, projections, conclusions, judgments and assumptions, these activities (the things the reader does) are not merely instrumental, or mechanical, but essential, and the act of description must both begin and end with them." (Fish 1980, 3)

JS