Joseph Hillis Miller's Books

The J. Hillis Miller Reader

By: Joseph Hillis Miller,Julian Wolfreys

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The J. Hillis Miller Reader

By: Joseph Hillis Miller,Julian Wolfreys

This anthology exhibits the diversity, inventiveness, and intellectual energy of the writings of J. Hillis Miller, the most significant North American literary critic of the twentieth century. From the 1950s onward, Miller has made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the practice and theory of literary criticism, the ethics and responsibilities of teaching and reading, and the role of literature in the modern world. He has also shown successive generations of scholars and students the necessity of comprehending the relationship between philosophy and literature. Divided into six sections, the volume provides more than twenty significant extracts from Millers works. In addition, there is a new interview with Miller, as well as a series of specially commissioned critical responses to Millers work by a number of the leading figures in literary and cultural studies today. Following a comprehensive critical introduction by the editor, each section has a brief introduction, directing the reader toward pertinent themes. There is also a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology of Millers professional life and activities. This reader, the first of Miller's work in English, provides an indispensable overview and introduction to one of the most original critical voices to have emerged since the inception of the teaching of English and American literature in universities in the English-speaking world.

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470

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Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804750564

ISBN 13

9780804750561

On Literature

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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On Literature

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

Beginning with the nature of literature, this also asks the questions of why we should read literature and why literature has such authority over us.This will be essential reading for any interested in the future of literature.

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184

Publisher

Psychology Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0415261244

ISBN 13

9780415261241

Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading

By: Joseph Hillis Miller,Manuel Asensi

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Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading

By: Joseph Hillis Miller,Manuel Asensi

J. Hillis Miller's text deals mainly with Anthony Trollope's Ayala's angel and Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.

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560

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Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804732442

ISBN 13

9780804732444

Topographies

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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Topographies

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

This book investigates the function of topographical names and descriptions in a variety of narratives, poems, and philosophical or theoretical texts, primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries, but including also Plato and the Bible. Topics include the initiating efficacy of speech acts, ethical responsibility, political or legislative power, the translation of theory from one topographical location to another, the way topographical delineations can function as parable or allegory, and the relation of personification to landscape.

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400

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804723796

ISBN 13

9780804723794

Illustration

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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Illustration

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

Positioning himself in the slippery divide between two highly charged critical approaches--deconstruction and cultural studies--J. Hillis Miller explains why the split occurred and offers, for the first time, an eloquent analysis of the goals and methods of cultural studies. Miller's Illustration is an intellectual adventure that transgresses the boundaries of critical theory to reveal the ideological forces at work. The result, art critic Norman Bryson concludes, "is an extraordinary performance". In a positive, constructive way, Miller describes cultural studies as, primarily, a means of contextualizing works of art. Relating the assumptions behind this approach to recent social, political, and technological changes, he shows how cultural studies is itself subject to its context and thus perhaps misguided insofar as it portrays art objects as "mere illustration". In particular, Miller considers new forms of electronic research in the humanities which, with their vast, homogenizing effect on data, can compel a critic to reconfigure information--in fact, to create the context that he or she means simply to identify. To illustrate this phenomenon, Miller investigates one topic of importance for cultural studies: the relation of verbal and visual forms in multimedia works. Drawing examples from Twain, Gorey, Mallarme, James, Ruskin, Heidegger, Dickens, and Turner, he shows how neither word nor image takes priority in such collaborations; nor is either a mere representation of a pre-existing reality. The transformations wrought by cultural artifacts on their contexts, Miller contends, must be identified through detailed and vigilant "rhetorical" readings if the force of a work of art is tobe passed on into the current cultural situation. And for the new form these readings take, the reader-critic must in turn assume responsibility.

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Page Count

172

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674443578

ISBN 13

9780674443570

Others

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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Others

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

This volume fulfills the author's career-long reflections on radical otherness in literature. J. Hillis Miller investigates otherness through ten nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors: Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, E. M. Forster, Marcel Proust, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. From the exquisite close readings for which he is celebrated, Miller reaps a capacious understanding of otherness--one reachable not through theory but through literature itself. Otherness has wide valence in contemporary literary and cultural studies and is often understood as a misconception by hegemonic groups of subaltern ones. In a pleasing counter to this, Others conceives of otherness as something that inhabits sameness. Instances of the ''wholly other'' within the familiar include your sense of self or your beloved, your sense of your culture as such, or your experience of literary, theoretical, and philosophical works that belong to your own culture--works that are themselves haunted by otherness. Though Others begins and ends with chapters on theorists, the testimony they offer about otherness is not taken as more compelling than that of such literary works as Dicken's Our Mutual Friend, Conrad's ''The Secret Sharer,'' Yeats's ''Cold Heaven,'' or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Otherness, as this book finds it in the writers read, is not an abstract concept. It is an elusive feature of specific verbal constructs, different in each case. It can be glimpsed only through close readings that respect this diversity, as the plural in the title--Others--indicates. We perceive otherness in the way that the unseen--and the characters' emotional responses to it--ripples the conservative ideological surface of Howard's End. We sense it as chaos in Schlegel's radical concept of irony. And we gaze at it in the multiple personifications of Heart of Darkness. Each testifies in its own way to the richness and tangible weight of an otherness close at hand.

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300

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691012237

ISBN 13

9780691012230

Ariadne's Thread

Story Lines

By: J. Hillis Miller

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Ariadne's Thread

Story Lines

By: J. Hillis Miller

What line should the critic follow in explicating, unfolding, or unknotting . . . passages? How should the critic thread her or his way into the labyrinthine problems of narrative form?--from chapter I In this brilliant and engaging book, one of America's leading literary critics explores the intricacies of narrative theory. Using the image of Ariadne's thread, which was given to Theseus to carry into the labyrinth so that he could find his way out, J. Hillis Miller traces out the "line" so often associated with narrative and writing in general. In the process he illuminates the nature of literature as well as the nature of narrative. Considering a wide range of texts from Western literature over the last two centuries--in particular Meredith's The Egoist, Goethe's Elective Affinities, and Borges's "Death and the Compass"--Miller explores the way rhetorical devices and figurative language interrupt, break into, delay, and expand storytelling. He also illustrates these rhetorical disruptions of narrative logic in his own work. In its four chapters--about the role of line, character, interpersonal relationships, and figurative language in narrative--Miller's study encounters in its own language the problems it discusses, as concepts and words are scrutinized for their diverse meanings and resonances. Demonstrating that every narrative, including this one about the nature of narrative, has divergent lines and multiple motives and uses, Ariadne's Thread tells its story and enacts its subject at the same time.

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308

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300063091

ISBN 13

9780300063097

Reading Narrative

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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Reading Narrative

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

Reading Narrative is, in the author's words, a book about "how to make sense of stories or how to identify the ways they may fail to make sense". Hillis Miller presents discussions of narratives and dialogues in the Western European tradition -- the works of such writers as Sophocles, Plato, Shakespeare, Henry James, Kierkegaard, Laurence Sterne, Proust, Balzac, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Miller's new readings of Aristotle's Poetics, Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Gaskell's Cranford, Pater's "Apollo in Picardy", and many other works generate a comprehensive and original theory of narrative as he addresses questions about the ends, beginnings, and middles of the narrative line. Miller demonstrates the uses of multiple narrators, abrupt shifts in syntax (anacoluthon), indirect discourse, interwoven plots, and figures of speech -- including irony, "the master trope that is not a trope". His narrative analysis, in which line images function as salient examples. draws the reader's attention in the same way that a master storyteller holds an audience.

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275

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806130970

ISBN 13

9780806130972

Versions of Pygmalion

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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Versions of Pygmalion

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

The literary school called deconstruction has long been dogged by the charge that it is unprincipled, its doors closed to the larger world of moral and social concern. J. Hillis Miller, one of America s leading teacher-critics, sets the record straight by looking into a series of fictions that allow him to show that ethics has always been at the heart of deconstructive literary criticism. Miller proves his point not by assertion but by doing deconstruction is here in the hands of a master teacher. Miller s controlling image is Ovid s Pygmalion, who made a statue that came alive and whose descendants (the incestuous Myrrha, the bloodied Adonis) then had to bear the effects of what he did. All storytellers can be seen as Pygmalions, creating characters (personification) who must then act, choose, and evaluate (what Miller calls the ethics of narration ). If storytellers must be held accountable for what they create, then so must critics or teachers who have their own stories to tell when they write or discuss stories. If the choices are heavy, they are also, Miller wryly points out, happily unpredictable. The teacher s first ethical act is the choice of what to teach, and Miller chooses his texts boldly. As an active reader, the kind demanded by deconstruction, Miller refashions each story, another ethical act, an intervention that may have social, political, and historical consequences. He then looks beyond text and critical theory to ask whether writing literature, reading it, teaching it, or writing about it makes anything happen in the real world of material history.

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286

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674934857

ISBN 13

9780674934856

The J. Hillis Miller Reader

By: Joseph Hillis Miller,Julian Wolfreys

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The J. Hillis Miller Reader

By: Joseph Hillis Miller,Julian Wolfreys

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470

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Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804750564

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9780804750561

Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading

By: Joseph Hillis Miller,Manuel Asensi

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Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading

By: Joseph Hillis Miller,Manuel Asensi

J. Hillis Miller's text deals mainly with Anthony Trollope's Ayala's angel and Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.

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560

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Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804732442

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9780804732444

Charles Dickens

The World of His Novels

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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Charles Dickens

The World of His Novels

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

George Orwell once said of Dickensâe(tm) work: âeoeIt is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world.âe In this book, J. Hillis Miller attempts to identify this âeoeworld,âe to show how a single view of life pervades every novel that Dickens wrote, and to trace the development of this view throughout the chronological span of Dickensâe(tm) career. There are full critical analyses of six of the novelsâe"Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friendâe"and shorter discussions of many of the others. Each novel has been viewed as the transformation of the real world of Dickensâe(tm) experience into an imaginary world with certain special qualities of its own. Certain elements persist through all the novels, the most important of which are the general situation of the hero at the beginning of the story and the general nature of the world in which he lives. Each of Dickensâe(tm) heroes begins his life cut off from other people, in a world which seems menacing and unfriendly and, on the social side, composed of inexplicable rituals and mysterious conventions; each lives, like Paul Dombey, âeoewith an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange.âe The heroes then move through successive adventures in an attempt to understand the world, to integrate themselves into it, and thus to find their true identity. Initially creatures of poverty and indigence, those characters reach out for something which transcends the material world and the self, something other than human, which will support and maintain the self without engulfing it. Within the totality of Dickens' novels this problemâe"the search for selfhoodâe"is stated and restated, until, in the later novels, the answer is found to line in a rejections of the past, the given, and the exterior, and a reorientation toward the future and the free human spirit itself as the only true sources of value. With a real understating and sympathy for his subject, Miller manages to transport us into the midst of Dickensâe(tm) âeoeworldâe and to bring alive for us the whole strange and wonderful tribe that people his novels. This is an enlightening, well-written, enjoyable book for anyone who has ever had an interest in Dickens and his work.

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372

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674110005

ISBN 13

9780674110007

Evolution and Literary Theory

By: Joseph Carroll

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Evolution and Literary Theory

By: Joseph Carroll

Over the past two decades, poststructuralism in its myriad forms has come to dominate literary criticism to the exclusion of virtually any other point of view. Few scholars have escaped the coercive authority of its programmatic radicalism. In Evolution and Literary Theory, Joseph Carroll vigorously attacks the foundational principles of poststructuralism and offers in their stead a bold new theory that situates literary criticism within the matrix of evolutionary theory.

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1096

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826209793

ISBN 13

9780826209795

Dickens Novels as Verse

By: Joseph P. Jordan

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Dickens Novels as Verse

By: Joseph P. Jordan

As its startling and aggressive title suggests, Dickens Novels as Verse is no standard work of literary criticism. It is, in fact, altogether new and original. Jordan likens the experience of some of the great Dickens novels, particularly the later ones (namely, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend) to the experience of lyric verse. The point is not that Dickens novels could ever be mistaken for lyric poems, but that the experience of some of the best of Dickens's novels, despite their undoubted sprawl, is like the experience of lyric poems--is so because the novels are made up of the same things that make great verse great: intricate, largely unnoticeable tissues of alliteration-like patterning that net across the work and give narratively insignificant coherence to it. Dickens Novels as Verse meticulously describes these book-length patterns in clear, lucid prose. Its three chapters, each focused on a single Dickens novel, are full of close analyses that can be immediately used by teachers, students, and all other readers of Dickens to grasp why Dickens always seems to be a greater writer than the quality of his ideas might lead us to expect.

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Page Count

159

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1611475244

ISBN 13

9781611475241

For Derrida

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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For Derrida

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

This book, written by an author who was a close friend of Jacques Derrida for 40 years, is 'For Derrida'in two ways. Firstly, it is dedicated to his memory. Secondly, it acts as an advocate for his work. the chapters focusing especially on his late work, including passages from the last, as yet unpublished seminars.

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358

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823235211

ISBN 13

9780823235216

Heart of Darkness

By: Joseph Conrad

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Heart of Darkness

By: Joseph Conrad

This volume presents the text of the 1921 Heinemann edition of Conrad's classic short novel along with documents that place the work in historical context and critical essays that read Heart of Darkness from several contemporary critical perspectives. The text and essays are complemented by biographical and critical introductions, bibliographies, and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms. In this third edition, the section of cultural documents and illustrations is entirely new, as are two recent exemplary critical essays by Gabrielle McIntire and Tony C. Brown that synthesize a variety of current critical approaches.

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396

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0312457537

ISBN 13

9780312457532

Tennyson and the Text

The Weaver's Shuttle

By: Gerhard Joseph

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Tennyson and the Text

The Weaver's Shuttle

By: Gerhard Joseph

This 1992 study of Tennyson evolves its themes from the weaving figure of The Lady of Shalott, which becomes a kind of parable for the author and his texts. Taking its derivation from the Latin texere, 'to weave', Professor Joseph's focus on poetic texture and a sense of textuality leads to a consciousness of his own critical and interpretative weaving, while revealing a pattern in the fabric of Tennyson's work. This procedure brings together a theory of perception, developed in the first part of this study, with an analysis of the gendering of Tennyson's characters in the second part, and engages with the methodologies of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and gender theory. The weaving metaphor also opens up a key theoretical issue regarding Tennyson's poetics: is the textual shuttle managed by the controlling hand of a historically definable author, or is the poetic weaver 'cursed' like the Lady of Shalott to suffer a mystifying doom at the 'unseen hand' of an all-pervasive textuality that occludes authorial intention?

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Page Count

300

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521413907

ISBN 13

9780521413909

Feminist Milton

By: Joseph Wittreich

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Feminist Milton

By: Joseph Wittreich

No detailed description available for "Feminist Milton".

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208

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501743600

ISBN 13

9781501743603

The Disappearance of God

Five Nineteenth-century Writers

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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The Disappearance of God

Five Nineteenth-century Writers

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

A landmark work of literary criticism by one of the foremost interpreters of nineteenth-century England, The Disappearance of God confronts the consciousness of an absent (though perhaps still existent) God in the writings of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Browning, Emily Bronte, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. J. Hillis Miller surveys the intellectual and material developments that conspired to cut man off from God -- among other factors the city, developments within Christianity, subjectivism, and the emergence of the modern historical sense -- and shows how each writer's body of work reflects a sustained response to the experience of God's disappearance and a unique effort to weave a new fabric of connection between God and creation.

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Page Count

400

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0252069102

ISBN 13

9780252069109

Speech Acts in Literature

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

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Speech Acts in Literature

By: Joseph Hillis Miller

This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary works. Though the founding text of speech act theory, J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, repeatedly expels literature from the domain of felicitous speech acts, literature is an indispensable presence within Austin's book. It contains many literary references but also uses as essential tools literary devices of its own: imaginary stories that serve as examples and imaginary dialogues that forestall potential objections. How to Do Things with Words is not the triumphant establishment of a fully elaborated theory of speech acts, but the story of a failure to do that, the story of what Austin calls a "bogging down." After an introductory chapter that explores Austin's book in detail, the two following chapters show how Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in different ways challenge Austin's speech act theory generally and his expulsion of literature specifically. Derrida shows that literature cannot be expelled from speech actsrather that what he calls "iterability" means that any speech act may be literature. De Man asserts that speech act theory involves a radical dissociation between the cognitive and positing dimensions of language, what Austin calls language's "constative" and "performative" aspects. Both Derrida and de Man elaborate new speech act theories that form the basis of new notions of responsible and effective politico-ethical decision and action. The fourth chapter explores the role of strong emotion in effective speech acts through a discussion of passages in Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Austin. The final chapter demonstrates, through close readings of three passages in Proust, the way speech act theory can be employed in an illuminating way in the accurate reading of literary works.

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Page Count

253

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804742162

ISBN 13

9780804742160

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