Stanley Fish and the Place of Criticism
Christopher Knight on Stanley Fish’s Professional Correctness.
In Representations of the Intellectual (New York, 1994), Edward Said writes,
The particular threat to the intellectual today, whether in the West or the non-Western world, is not the academy, nor the suburbs, nor the appalling commercialism of journalism and publishing houses, but rather an attitude that I will call professionalism. By professional I mean thinking of your own work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one ear cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior - not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and “objective.”
“amateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession” Edward Said.
