zodiac7 May 2004

In 1971, SUNY-Buffalo professor Stanley Fish performed an experiment on his poetry class where he left a list of 5 authors on his blackboard from another class and told them it was a religious poem. The poetry students critiqued it surprisingly well, considering it was RANDOM and UTTERLY MEANINGLESS. He wrote about the incident, "My students did not proceed from the noting of distinguishing features to the recognition that they were confronted by a poem: rather, it was the act of recognition that came first - they knew in advance that they were dealing with a poem - and the distinguishing features then followed" (326).

Fish claims to have performed this same experiment thousands of times on lecture audiences with the same result, even though he is now hideously famous for it.