A Response to Stanly Fish's "How to Recognize a Poem when you See One"
Throughout human history, many have tried to answer a question that lies in the very core of our cultural life, and that is - how do we conceive the world surrounding us through our senses and our minds. What is it that we "do" when we "see" something and recognize it, and how do we give a meaning to that specific thing. Many ideas have examined this matter ever since the birth of man's quest for better understanding of himself and his surroundings. It is especially in poetry and literature that we can examine a fantastic inquiry of that notion, since literature is fundamentally drawn from humans will to express their inner entities and mental conceptions.
We can see an abstraction of that meter in Stanly Fish's article "How to recognize a poem when you see one" .In this article fish is trying to elucidate the process of poetry analyzing, and deal with a question that is in the base of literature interpretation: does a text compels its own recognition? how should a text recognition process be understood? Fish is producing an experiment in which he presents religious poetry students with a list of "meaningless" names and informs them it is a religious poem. As a result we are aware of the student's ability to perform a full analysis of that list of names: they were able to create complete relations of wards and meaning all based on the acknowledgment that they are confronted with a poem.
Fish is asking how they where able to perform this ability while examining the commonsense answer to that kind of performance that many critics and linguistics are committed to by which "the act of recognition is triggered by the observable presence of distinguishing features(225)". But as we realize, it does not answer the present experience of recognition:" m
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