July 11, 2003

The Same Old Song

By STANLEY FISH

It is only by remaining narrow that an enterprise can ensure its survival and its utility

It has only recently become clear to me that many of the arguments I have been making in these columns and elsewhere are not, as I had thought them to be, discrete but are, rather, deeply related and finally interchangeable.

The most abstract of these arguments is the one I call "theory minimalism." Like the others it is deflationary. That is, it tends to narrow the scope of an activity or a

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