Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum"

Children’s Responses to Heroism in Roald Dahl’s Matilda

“…The children in this study have a good understanding of the formal components of narrative fiction, an appreciation of moral scenarios, an awareness of real world issues, and a facility to read in, between and across fiction and reality. In fact, they do what reader response and audience reception theories suggest adult readers do: they operate within and outside interpretive communities (Fish 1970(Fish , 1976, they inhabit a virtual space (Iser 1976), or secondary world (Benton and Fox 1985) in which the text and their imaginations create the narrative and they negotiate their own meanings from the stimulus of the text and their socio-cultural context (Hall 1973, McQuail 2000.…”

“…Clearly, a different approach would be to spend time with just the novel: but the reality of children's engagement with Dahl's narratives comes via both book and film. Many of the answers given in the questionnaire (for example Matilda breaking into Trunchbull's house) referred to events not shown in our clips and so this study takes place against a backdrop of an informed interpretative community (Fish, 1976) that draws on multiple sources in its reader response.…”

Crisis Communication Response and Political Communities: The Unusual Case of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford

“…Indeed, partisan communities resemble what Stanley Fish (1976, 1980) calls "interpretative communities." Interpretative communities, Fish writes (1980, "are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts, for constituting their properties.…”

“…In the Ford case, some partisans have been creating meaning from the various news reports in a way that reflects their common, and often long, association with Ford. As the Ford case exists within a battle between interpretive communities-followers and oppositionistsone side also assumes its perception is true and the other's is not (Fish, 1976). Stuart Hall (1990) reminds us of this process of the production of difference and "the other": "there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental 'law of origin '" (p. 226).…”

Commonality AND difference? Attempts to escape from theoretical dualisms in emancipatory research in education

“…(Or conversely, we can choose to insist that others recognise our different experiences.) Elsewhere, I have suggested that Fish's (1987) concept of 'interpretive communities ' and Assiter's (1996) concept of 'epistemic community' may contribute to the negotiation of a path between relativist and realist approaches to difference, similarity, and the notion of emancipation (see Francis, 2001, for elaboration). These communities are formed around shared values, though containing a (often eclectic) mix of individuals and their experiences.…”