Stanley Fish is quoted in the following senses in Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (Routledge 1998):
(1). Stanley Fish has declared that texts do not have a literal meaning.”There is no such thing as literal meaning, if by literal meaning one means a meaning that is perspicuous no matter what the context and no matter what is in the speaker’s or hearer’s mind, a meaning that because it is prior to interpretation can serve as a constraint on interpretation.” (p135-1365).
(2) When Stanley Fish discussed the problem, he noted that some historians such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese had resolved it by simply declaring that historians can discover the truth about the past. His reply is that historians cannot know the past because in describing the past they use a language, “and that language must itself proceed from some ideological vision.” (p170)