1      Like Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish places readers in active roles as meaning makers. However, where Iser posits that repertoires and structures within texts will propel readings and account for the possibility of intersubjective interpretations, Fish suggests that intersubjective interpretations are a given, because a number of interpretive communities will already exist and readers who belong to these communities will share strategies for interpreting texts. Thus, interpretation is not so much interactive, but both active (driven by the reader) and intersubjective (situated within communities): "Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is to be read."

2      For Fish, our meanings and interpretations are more a product of our "situations" as readers. This interpretive situation, however, may have an overdetermined role in Fish's model of reading, as seen in the semantic overload that eventually develops around Fish's use of the term "situation." For instance, in "Is There a Text in This Class?" Fish explains that

3      sentences emerge only in situations, and within those situations, the normative meaning of an utterance will always be obvious . . . although within another situation that same utterance . . . will have another normative meaning . . . This does not mean that there is no way to discriminate between the meanings an utterance will have in different situations, but that the discrimination will already have been made by virtue of our being in a situation . . . (307-308)(5)

4      It seems odd that we might discern differences between alternative situations, if our vision is constrained by the situation we are already embedded in. Fish is trying to address the danger of (what he terms in an interesting correlate to Iser's "private world" of interpretation) the "infinite plurality" of meanings. Fish argues that the communities which we inhabit constrain and determine the meaning of texts: "An infinite plurality of meaning would be a fear only if sentences existed in a state in which they were not already embedded, and had come into view as a function of, some situation or other" (Is There a Text, 307). While Iser addresses his worry over private-subjective interpretations with the interaction of the text, Fish responds to his concern over the infinite plurality of meanings with the existence of the community. But Fish creates a circular model of reading: interpretive communities determine the meanings of texts and interpretive communities are determined based upon the meanings they attribute to texts. Although Fish claims that we won't be faced with an infinite plurality of meanings, we must, however, be prepared for an infinite plurality of interpretive situations.

5      But Fish offers insight into interpreting texts by broadening the model of reader/text interaction into a model of reader(s) and texts. By privileging the interpretations of communities of readers, Fish paves the way for new modes of reading and teaching that are based on dialogue and reader/community-centered learning. Ironically, however, Fish leaves the actual interactions between the members of communities mostly unexamined.(6) In part, this neglect is powered by a desire to conceptualize and abstract the process of interaction in theoretical terms.

6      At the same time, however, concretely examining the process of interpretation within a community is difficult, since it is so hard to see that process in action. When readers consider one possibility or another before selecting an interpretation, there is little record of it. Studies might ask readers to perform speak-out-loud protocols as they interpret a text and so develop some sense of the process of interpretation, but even this record would list only the individual's assessment of the process and might not speak directly to how that process is affected by the forces of communities. Electronic discussion forums that are reader-created and linked to textual passages like those at WORP may allow us to consider a model of reading that is based on the interaction with the text envisioned by Iser and that takes place with and within the communities pictured by Fish.