Rhetorical Faith: The Literary Hermeneutics of Stanley Fish by Phillip J. Donnelly (review)

366 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 modest task of careful scholarship rather than grand theorizing. Indeed, it seems a weakness that the book is not more ambitious, since an argument that took Walzer as a point of departure rather than a constant reference would have made for a more important and relevant study. Further, it is unclear how worthwhile a painstaking study of Walzer is in the current milieu. Walzer=s work on justice is innovative and powerful, and it has had some influence for its thesis that inequality in one sphere should not convert into inequality in another (e.g., wealth should not buy power). But Walzer was heavily criticized for his surprisingly moderate egalitarian aims, born of a refusal to offer criteria that might transcend particular communities or cultures. Nearly twenty years after Spheres of Justice was penned, there are not many Walzerians in political theory circles. Worse still are the fortunes of Walzer=s just war theory, which was developed in light of the Second World War and Vietnam. Today=s problems of postSoviet ethnic conflict and the challenges of globalization have made for a different empirical context that has changed the face of scholarship in international relations and which Walzer=s work, only modestly revised, does little to address. Orend hard-headedly addresses these latter difficulties, probing the distinctions that Walzer draws between just and unjust military interventions . The discussion of recent literature on global justice is well done, and there are also some very astute observations about Walzer=s peculiarly American myopia about international justice. Orend=s critical endorsement of Walzer is carefully mounted and persuasive. But attention to Walzer=s context-bound flaws might have prompted greater soul-searching about whether the energies of an able author such as Orend were best expended elsewhere. Nonetheless, Michael Walzer on War and Justice is a useful and stimulating study on an intriguing and independent-minded scholar. (CHRISTINE SYPNOWICH) Phillip J. Donnelly. Rhetorical Faith: The Literary Hermeneutics of Stanley Fish English Literary Studies Monograph Series, no. 84. 160. $15.50 Advocating interpretive charity as an alternative to interpretive egoism, Rhetorical Faith is a powerful critique of Fish=s reader-response criticism. Although few readers are likely to be converted to Donnelly=s >perspectival thinking rooted in caritas rather than atheism,= most will savour the dialectical subtlety of his dense and intricate arguments. Isolating the merely analogical use of religious discourse that informs Fish=s writing, Donnelly mounts nothing less than a theological argument against Fish=s literary hermeneutics, an argument that pits Augustinian caritas and trinitarian theism against the interpretive assumptions that enable Fish=s HUMANITIES 367 rhetorical project B anti-foundationalism, constructivism, and relativism. As Donnelly points out, Fish=s resolutely dualistic scheme B rhetoric versus rationalism B synonymizes and homogenizes opposing interpretive assumptions so that all beliefs in the mind-independent reality of matter or spirit become one and the same in their supposed endorsement of rationalism. The fatal flaw of such dualism is to construe reason as something independent of rhetoric in the first place. With its unmistakably Platonic overtones, the rhetoric/reason dichotomy might seem an unusual starting point for a postmodern rhetor, but Fish is no stranger to all-ornothing tactics. Fish maintains that the interpretive strategy of the reader creates the text, there being no text except that which a reader or an interpretive community of readers creates. Though common sense would concede that a text has some structure of determination, Fish challenges absolutely >the brute-fact status of the text.= Even at the most rudimentary level, he contends, the very grammar, syntax, and semantics of a text are created by the reader. Textual features, he writes, >appear (or do not appear) as a consequence of particular interpretive strategies ... there is no distinction between what the text gives and the reader supplies; he supplies everything.= Interpretive strategies, then, entirely determine meaning, and meaning, for Fish, is a temporal event, a sequential process that >happens= to the reader rather than something which is contained in formal semantic or stylistic units. Nevertheless, as Donnelly suggests, there is something spurious about this argument from temporality because any account of the reading process is perforce an...