Editing Stanley Fish (section)

==Milton==
Fish started his career as a [[Medieval studies|medievalist]]. His first book, published by [[Yale University Press]] in 1965, was on the late-medieval/early-Renaissance poet [[John Skelton (poet)|John Skelton]]. Fish explains in his partly biographical essay, "[[John Milton|Milton]], Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour" (published in ''There's No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . And It's a Good Thing, Too''), that he came to Milton by accident. In 1963, the same year that Fish started as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, its resident Miltonist, [[Constantinos Patrides|Constantinos A. Patrides]], received a grant. The chair of the department asked Fish to teach the Milton course, notwithstanding the fact that the young professor "had never &mdash; either as an undergraduate or in graduate school &mdash; taken a Milton course" (269). The eventual result was ''Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost'' (1967; rpt. 1997).  Fish's 2001 book, ''How Milton Works'', reflects five decades' worth of his scholarship on Milton. About this book, academic and critic [[John Mullan (academic)|John Mullan]] disagrees with Fish's interpretation that:
<blockquote> Our every likely value is defeated by his poetry. His book needs to presume that we find Milton's beliefs, and even more the sheer force of those beliefs, inimical. It never occurs to Fish that the [[Reader-response theory|ever-abused "reader"]] might share any values with Milton… Even when he has a point, Fish is wrestling Milton to his cause. There is no room to consider that Milton's poetry might be wise about human weakness, and that ''[[Paradise Lost]]'', for instance, might be more notable for its sense of tragedy than for its doctrinal correctness.<ref name="Zapp">{{Cite news |title= Satanic majesties |last=Mullan |first=John |date=4 August 2001 |work=The Guardian |url= https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/aug/04/classics.highereducation |access-date=18 April 2023}}</ref></blockquote>