Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies

“With six enormously influential and widely discussed books to his credit, Stanley Fish is perhaps the most quoted, most controversial, most in-demand, and most feared English teacher in the world, and one of the very best essayists in any field. . . . Beginning as, and remaining, a specialist in the literature of the English Renaissance up to Milton, Fish has transformed himself into a highly influential, widely discussed professor of law as well. And as his latest collection of essays, Doing What Comes Naturally, demonstrates, his interests are global, and include not only literature and law, but linguistics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, professionalism, and theoretically, any intellectual discourse whatsoever. . . . [A] masterful book.”—Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Times Literary Supplement

“Of literary critics whose work comes to mind under the heading ‘theory,’ Stanley Fish . . . has been preeminent as the orchestrator of a number of approaches to interpretation, chief among them reader-response criticism and deconstruction. . . . While no less rigorous than his earlier studies of Renaissance literature, Doing What Comes Naturally is a handy textbook for those who wish to catch up on the variety of questions to which literary criticism can usefully address itself today and to see a deconstructive method in action in various intellectual contexts, particularly in examining questions of literature and law.”—Peter Meisel, New York Times Book Review