Books by D. A. Miller

In Second Time Around, D. A. Miller seizes the opportunity of DVDs and streaming media; across thirteen essays, he watches digitally restored films by directors from Mizoguchi to Pasolini and from Hitchcock to Honda, looking to find not only what he first saw in them but also what he was then kept from seeing.

Miller probes what all the jokes laugh off: the embarrassingly mutual affinity between a "general" cultural form-the musical-and the despised "minority"-gay men-that was in fact that form's implicit audience.

The Austen heroine must suppress her wit to become the one and not the other, to become, that is, a person fit to be tied in a conjugal knot. But for herself, Austen refuses personhood, with all its constraints and needs, and disappears into the sourceless anonymity of her style.