Books by J. Hillis Miller

An exploration of the intricacies of narrative theory. Considering a range of texts from Western literature over the past two centuries, Miller explores the way rhetorical devices and figurative language interrupt, break into, delay and expand storytelling.

Communities in Fiction reads in detail 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 for communities or non-communities in the real world.

Theory Now and Then contains the more overtly theoretical essays by J. Hillis Miller published between 1966 and 1989. These essays trace the trajectory of theory over the last thirty years in the United States: from the “Continental Shift” announced in the Yale Colloquium of 1965, through Miller’s assimilation of the work of the Geneva Critics, to the shift to that “deconstruction in America” in which Miller played a conspicuous role.Included here are review essays on other theorists’ work: the Geneva Circle including Georges Poulet; Joseph Riddel, Edward Said, Meyer Abrams; and the critics of the “Yale School,” such as Jacques Derrida and others, Paul De Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom, with whom Miller was associated. Exemplary readings of the theorists themselves, and of texts by Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams punctuate these essays.

Tropes, Parables, Performatives collects J. Hillis Miller’s essays on seven major twentieth-century authors: Lawrence, Kafka, Stevens, Williams, Woolf, Hardy, and Conrad. For all their evident differences, these essays from early to late explore a single intuition about literature, which may be framed by three words: “trope,” “parable,” and “performative.”Throughout these essays Miller is fascinated with the tropological dimension of literary language, with the way figures of speech turn aside the telling of a story or the presentation of a literary theme. The exploration of this turning leads to the recognition that all works of literature are parabolic, “thrown beside” their real meaning. They tell one story but call forth something else.Miller further agrees that all parables are fundamentally performative. They do not merely name something or give knowledge, but rather use words to make something happen, to get the reader from here to there. Each essay here attempts to formulate what, in a given case, the reader perfomatively enters by way of parabolic trope.

Written over a thirty-five year period, these essays reflect the changes in J. Hillis Miller’s thinking on Victorian topics, from an early concern with questions of consciousness, form, and intellectual history, to a more recent focus on parable and the development of a deconstructive ethics of reading.Miller defines the term “Victorian subjects” in more than one sense. The phrase identifies an historical time but also names a concern throughout with subjectivity, consciousness, and selfhood in Victorian literature. The essays show various Victorian subjectivities seeking to ground themselves in their own underlying substance or in some self beneath or beyond the self. But “Victorian subjects” also discusses those who were subject to Queen Victoria, to the reigning ideologies of the time, to historical, social, and material conditions, including the conditions under which literature was written, published, distributed, and consumed.These essays, taken together, sketch the outlines of ideological assumptions within the period about the self, interpersonal relations, nature, literary form, the social function of literature, and other Victorian subjects.

This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary work.

"After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric." This title challenges Theodor Adorno's famous statement about aesthetic production after "The Holocaust", arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences.

Focuses on Derrida's late work, including passages from the last, as yet unpublished, seminars. This book aims to render Derrida's writings justice. It should be remembered, however, that, according to Derrida himself, every rendering of justice is also a transformative interpretation.

The work of a master critic writing at the peak of his powers, this magisterial book draws on speech act theory, as it originated with J. L. Austin and was further developed by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, to investigate the many dimensions of doing things with words in James's fiction.

This innovative work sets two texts by two different authors on facing pages, designed so that they read in tandem-Miller's text on the right, Asensi's on the left. Miller analyzes the changes in the contemporary research university in the West; Asensi provides the first comprehensive interpretation of Miller's work.

This work investigates a cluster of concepts that gather around the question of topography and its uses in criticism. They include the initiating efficacy of speech acts, ethical responsibility, political or legislative power and the relation of personification to landscape.

A masterclass in attentive reading offering brilliant insights into two of George Eliot's novels

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.