Fish, Chandler, and Eagleton

In Stanley Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”, Fish uses his students to prove the point that a poem is only labeled so because of the people who are reading it and not because it is intrinsically a poem. In other words, a poem, for Fish, arises from the fact that people view it as a poem and not because there are certain characteristics that make it a poem, per se. This is a view that can be linked to that of Chandler’s but on the subject of genres. In Daniel Chandler’s “An Introduction to Gene Theory”, he establishes that the way “we define a genre depends on our purposes” (Chandler). A person does allow a genre to blindly guide the way he reads a text. Instead, that person’s very definition of the genre can change depending on what he is reading. Chandler and Fish’s ideas go together for they are both establishing that the way something is interpreted does in fact rely heavily on the reader himself. This does not mean that the genre is just an obsolete title that people hold no regard for and is just a means of cataloguing books. Instead, the genre does give some guidance as to what the text will be about. This guidance, however, is not the end all to what a text is about but is actually much more fluid for the reader can change the very definition of that genre depending on what he has read. The text is not concretely defined by a certain genre because it is “a result of the different interpretive operation we perform and not of something inherent in one or the other” (Fish).
In Terry Eagleton’s “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”, he also voices the importance of an individual’s interpretive preferences especially when deciding can be considered literature. He makes the point that although society may presently view the works of Shakespeare and Yeats as part of literature, this may not be true in the future. This is because the very definition of literature “has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time” (11 Eagleton). He argues this by reminding the reader that some texts that were highly regarded as the philosophy of people’s lives at one time are now considered as merely literature. This can be seen with the once, and maybe even still, powerful text of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engel’s “The Communist Manifesto”. This text was at one point so influential that it was responsible for the revolting and revolutionizing of thousands of poor farmers against the oppressive bourgeoisie. It moves a nation of people to throw away their current way of life and fight with life and limb for what The Manifesto proclaimed was rightfully theirs. This once powerful and even omnipotent text is now considered a piece of literature, a book that students are told to read in order to learn about a way of life, many years ago. The meaning and interpretation of texts change over time, much like how the definition of different genres evolve from person to person, for “all literary works…are ‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them” (12 Eagelton).