Download or read book J Hillis Miller and the Possibilities of Reading written by Eamonn Dunne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-05-06 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. Hillis Miller is undoubtedly one of the most important literary critics of the past century. For well over five decades his work has been at the forefront of theoretical and philosophical thinking and writing. From his earliest work with Georges Poulet and the so-called Geneva School, which introduced a generation of North American critics to the concept of a phenomenological literary hermeneutic, to a deconstructive rhetorical philology and an ethically motivated textual analysis, Miller's readings have not only reflected major movements in literary theory, they have also created them.Surprisingly, Eamonn Dunne's J. Hillis Miller and the Possibilities of Reading is the first book devoted exclusively to examining Miller's work. Dunne argues that an appreciation of Miller is crucial to an informed understanding about the radical changes occurring in critical thinking in the humanities in recent years. This book, the first of its kind, will be a vital and enabling avenue for further research into J. Hillis Miller's exemplary and prolific output.
Download or read book Reading Theory Now written by Eamonn Dunne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-06-20 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Theory Now explores movements in critical thinking through a host of radical theorists, and channels those movements through the work of one of the most influential proponents of critical interpretation in the world today, J. Hillis Miller. It enables its readers to see how and why theoretical models of reading are of use only in the practical event of reading literary and philosophical texts, that the politics and poetics of interpretive paradigms are constantly shifting, changing and evolving as present day perspectives transform those traditions unalterably. it seeks to invite its readers to challenge the concept of the paradigm, the school, the movement, even the sequence, by presenting them with a choice to read in their own way, to "dip" in and out of singular events of interpretation from A to Z. In this respect Reading Theory Now invites its audience to decide for him/herself where they begin and end their own critical analyses. Reading Theory Now also contains: *A Preface by J. Hillis Miller which comments on the significance of reading as an event and the centrality of political and ecological issues in his most recent work. *An Afterword by Julian Wolfreys which tackles these issues in Miller's latest books. *A select annotated bibliography which will help students coming to Miller's work for the first time to find their own way into his vast critical corpus.
Download or read book On Literature written by J. Hillis Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates rage over what kind of literature we should read, what is good and bad literature, and whether in the global, digital age, literature even has a future. But what exactly is literature? Why should we read literature? How do we read literature? These are some of the important questions J. Hillis Miller answers in this beautifully written and passionate book. He begins by asking what literature is, arguing that the answer lies in literature's ability to create an imaginary world simply with words. On Literature also asks the crucial question of why literature has such authority over us. Returning to Plato, Aristotle and the Bible, Miller argues we should continue to read literature because it is part of our basic human need to create imaginary worlds and to have stories. Above all, On Literature is a plea that we continue to read and care about literature.
Download or read book The J Hillis Miller Reader written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book J Hillis Miller and the Possibilities of Reading written by Eamonn Dunne and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-05-06 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >
Download or read book Fiction and Repetition written by J. Hillis Miller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1985-10-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fiction and Repetition, one of our leading critics and literary theorists offers detailed interpretations of seven novels: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Well-Beloved, Conrad's Lord Jim, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts. Miller explores the multifarious ways in which repetition generates meaning in these novels—repetition of images, metaphors, motifs; repetition on a larger scale of episodes, characters, plots; and repetition from one novel to another by the same or different authors. While repetition creates meanings, it also, Miller argues, prevents the identification of a single determinable meaning for any of the novels; rather, the patterns made by the various repetitive sequences offer alternative possibilities of meaning which are incompatible. He thus sees “undecidability” as an inherent feature of the novels discussed. His conclusions make a provocative contribution to current debates about narrative theory and about the principles of literary criticism generally. His book is not a work of theory as such, however, and he avoids the technical terminology dear to many theorists; his book is an attempt to interpret as best he can his chosen texts. Because of his rare critical gifts and his sensitivity to literary values and nuances, his readings send one back to the novels with a new appreciation of their riches and their complexities of form.
Download or read book Black Holes J Hillis Miller or Boustrophedonic Reading written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. Hillis Miller's text deals mainly with Anthony Trollope's Ayala's angel and Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.
Download or read book Communities in Fiction written by J. Hillis Miller and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communities in Fiction reads six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) in the light of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams, Martin Heidegger, and Jean- Luc Nancy. The book’s topic is the question of how communities or noncommunities are represented in fictional works. Such fictional communities help the reader understand real communities, including those in which the reader lives. As against the presumption that the trajectory in literature from Victorian to modern to postmodern is the story of a gradual loss of belief in the possibility of community, this book demonstrates that communities have always been presented in fiction as precarious and fractured. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Pynchon and Cervantes in the last chapter demonstrates that period characterizations are never to be trusted. All the features both thematic and formal that recent critics and theorists such as Fredric Jameson and many others have found to characterize postmodern fiction are already present in Cervantes’s wonderful early-seventeenth-century “Exemplary Story,” “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” All the themes and narrative devices of Western fiction from the beginning of the print era to the present were there at the beginning, in Cervantes Most of all, however, Communities in Fiction looks in detail at its six fictions, striving to see just what they say, what stories they tell, and what narratological and rhetorical devices they use to say what they do say and to tell the stories they do tell. The book attempts to communicate to its readers the joy of reading these works and to argue for the exemplary insight they provide into what Heidegger called Mitsein— being together in communities that are always problematic and unstable.
Download or read book Versions of Pygmalion written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book Speech Acts in Literature written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Poets of Reality written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1965 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many books deal individually with each of the major writers treated in Poets of Reality, none attempts through analyses of these particular men and their works, to identify the new directions taken by twentieth-century literature. J. Hillis Miller, challenging the assumption that modern poetry is merely the extension of an earlier romanticism, presents critical studies of the six central figuresâe"Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williamsâe"who played key roles in evolving a poetry in which âeoereality comes to be present to the senses, and present in the words of the poem which ratify this possession.âe A new kind of poetry has appeared in the twentieth century, the author claims, a poetry which, growing out of romanticism and symbolism, goes far beyond it. The old generalizations about the nature and use of poetry are no longer applicable, and it is the gradual emergence of new forms, culminating in the work of Williams, that Miller traces and defines.
Download or read book Others written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-21 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Reading Conrad written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For half a century, J. Hillis Miller has been a premier figure in English and comparative literature, influencing and leading the direction of literary studies. What is less well-known is that he has been equally influential in Conrad studies with his work on nihilism, language, and narrative in Joseph Conrad's fiction. Reading Conrad, authored by J. Hillis Miller and edited by John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe, charts Miller's shifting insights into Joseph Conrad's fiction
Download or read book Reading Narrative written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Reading De Man Reading written by Lindsay Waters and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reading for Our Time written by J. Hillis Miller and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterclass in attentive reading offering brilliant insights into two of George Eliot's novels
Download or read book Topographies written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
