Interpretive communities

Interpretive communities are a theoretical concept stemming from reader-response criticism and invented by Stanley Fish. They appeared in an article by Fish in 1976 entitled "Interpreting the "Variorum". [Stanley Fish, "Is There A Text in This Class", Harvard U. Press, (1980), 147–174] Fish's theory states that a text does not have meaning outside of a set of cultural assumptions regarding both what the characters mean and how they should be interpreted. This cultural context often includes authorial intent, though it is not limited to it. Fish claims that we interpret texts because we are part of an interpretive community that gives us a particular way of reading a text. Furthermore, he claims, we cannot know whether someone is a part of our interpretive community or not, because any act of communication that we could engage in to tell whether we are part of the same interpretive community would have to be interpreted. That is, because we cannot escape our interpretive community, we can never really know its limits.

The idea has been very influential in reader-response criticism, though it has also been very controversial. It is often interpreted as a relativistic standpoint that "words have no meaning," though this is not what Fish means. Quite the opposite, Fish is a staunch advocate of his own readings of various texts. Rather, he means to point out that readings of a text are culturally constructed. His point can be compared to that of Louis Althusser on ideology, or to Immanuel Kant's metaphysics.

References