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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.
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.
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.
This, the first reader of Miller's work in English, is an indispensable overview and introduction to one of the most original and challenging critical voices to have emerged since the inception of the teaching of English and American literature in universities in the English-speaking world.
J. Hillis Miller's text deals mainly with Anthony Trollope's Ayala's angel and Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.
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.
The film-book The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller is based on the documentary film by the same name made in 2010. Together with the film transcript and an interview conducted by Taryn Devereux, the essays in this volume have been gathered from several international events devoted to Miller's works. With essays by Henry Sussman, Sarah Dillon, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Royle, Eamonn Dunne and Michael O'Rourke, Dragan Kujund i, Julian Wolfreys and J. Hillis Miller, The First Sail in itself forms a vast network of references, operating as an installation and network of emerging projects."
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...
Juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust with Kafka's novels and Morrison's 'Beloved', asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony.
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 co...