Stanley Fish (April 19, 1938) is one of the most influential literary theorists of the twentieth century.
Trained as a Milton scholar, Fish became the central figure in reader-response criticism, the theoretical movement that shifted attention away from the text as a fixed object and toward the reader as an active participant in making meaning.
His most enduring contribution is the concept of interpretive communities: the idea that meaning is not discovered in texts but produced by groups of readers who share interpretive strategies so deeply ingrained they feel like natural perception rather than trained response. That idea unsettled a lot of assumptions that had underwritten a lot of writing instruction, such as the Plain Language movement, which treats clarity as a property of sentences themselves (i.e.—an effect achieved by following prescriptive rules like choose simple words, cut excess, and eliminate ambiguity) rather than as an effect produced within a set of expectations shared between writer and reader.
In the hands of practitioners like George D. Gopen, Fish's ideas eventually produced a more honest and more useful account of what skilled writing actually does.