1. Is There a Woman in This Text?

Abstract

L ET ME start with an anecdote. Readers of Stanley Fish's There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (1980) will recognize in my title an allusion to the anecdote which gives him his. It's also, appropriately enough, an interpretative joke (though at whose expense is not immediately clear); and, since it involves the triangulation of two men and a woman, a joke that falls structurally into a category defined by Freud as at once seductive and aggressive. Seductive, because you'll recall that for Freud this is always the aim of the sexual joke directed at a woman; aggressive, because the presence of another man turns desire to hostility, enlisting the originally interfering third party as an ally. The function of this kind of joke is both to humiliate and to eliminate the woman, becoming a joke at the precise point when it is directed no longer at her but at the onlooker-turned-listener.' Here, then, is Fish's anec-joke, which involves two male professors of differing critical persuasions and a female student whose theoretical innocence has already been violated by of them: On the first day of the new semester a colleague at Johns Hopkins University was approached by a student who, as it turned out, had just taken a course from me. She put to him what think you would agree is a perfectly straightforward question: Is there a text in this class? Responding with a confidence so perfect that he was unaware of it (although in telling the story, he refers to this moment as walking into the trap), my colleague said, Yes; it's the Norton Anthology of Literature, whereupon the trap (set not by the student but by the infinite capacity of language for being appropriated) was sprung: No, no, she said, I mean in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it just us?2 Despite the pious allusion to language's infinite capacity for appropriation, it's not hard to see that the student here, rather than language, is being appropriated as two professors vie for possession of the untutored female mind. But the woman student-described by the unnamed professor as one of Fish's victims-is not simply the victim of Fishy doctrine (parodically rendered as the instability of the text and the unavailability of determinate meanings); she's also the fall-doll who sets Fish's theoretical discourse in motion-the idiot

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