J. Hillis Miller
J. Hillis Miller | |
---|---|
Literary critic | |
Known for | Advancing literary deconstruction as means to study literature |
Spouse |
Dorothy James
(m. 1949; died 2021) |
Children | 3 |
Relatives | J. Hillis Miller Sr. (father) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Harvard University, Oberlin College |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, University of California, Irvine |
Doctoral students | Stuart Moulthrop, Leslie Heywood |
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. (March 5, 1928 – February 7, 2021)
Early life
Miller was born in Newport News, Virginia, on March 5, 1928, to Nell Martin (née Crizer) and J. Hillis Miller Sr.[3][4] His mother was a homemaker and his father a Baptist minister who was professor of psychology at the College of William & Mary, and would go on to serve as the president of the University of Florida.[4]
Miller graduated from
Career
Miller started his career as a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in 1953.[4] During this time, Miller was heavily influenced by fellow Johns Hopkins professor and Belgian literary critic Georges Poulet and the Geneva School of literary criticism, which Miller characterized as "the consciousness of the consciousness of another, the transposition of the mental universe of an author into the interior space of the critic's mind."[5] This was also the time that was introduced to Paul de Man who was a member of a faculty and Jacques Derrida, a visiting professor, with whom he would remain associated.[4]
In 1972, he joined the faculty at
By this time, Miller had emerged as an important humanities and literature scholar specializing in Victorian and Modernist literature, with a keen interest in the ethics of reading and reading as a cultural act.[5] At a time, he was supervising at least 14 doctoral dissertations studying Victorian literature and novels.[4]
In 1986, Miller left Yale to work at the
After his retirement, he wrote over 15 books and many articles in journals and was also active on the international lecturing circuit. He was also served on dissertation committees in his retirement supervising dissertations and doctoral theses works at
Role as a deconstructionist
Miller was associated with a group of scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, collectively referred to as the
Miller defined the movement as searching for "the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all",[6][4] and said that there are multiple layers to any text, both its clear surface and its deep countervailing subtext:
On the one hand, the "obvious and univocal reading" always contains the "deconstructive reading" as a parasite encrypted within itself as part of itself. On the other hand, the "deconstructive" reading can by no means free itself from the metaphysical reading it means to contest.[13]
Miller's "The Critic as Host" could be viewed as a reply to M. H. Abrams, who presented a paper, "The Deconstructive Angel," at a session of the Modern Language Association in December 1976, criticizing deconstruction and the methods of Miller. Miller presented his paper just after Abrams's presentation at the same session.[14] He made the case that words and text lacking objective outside or providing meaning didn't mean they were the "prison-house of language," but, instead, they were a "place of joy" where the critics had the freedom to associate and provide various possibilities eventually guiding the meaning.[4] The movement continued to gain popularity through the next decade, presenting a paper called "Triumph of Theory" at the 1986 session of the Modern Language Association.[4] He was also noted to have made the topic of deconstruction more accessible to a wider audience by publishing in magazines including Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine.[12]
He was also a defender of the movement in the late 1980s when the field was losing some of its popularity.[4] He leaned on ideas that he termed 'ethics of learning' where he countered critics by arguing that it was the reader's obligation to try and find meaning in the text even when it appeared impossible.[4]
Personal life
Miller married Dorothy James in 1949, and remained married until her death in January 2021. The couple had two daughters and a son.[15] Miller died from COVID-19[16] on February 7, 2021, the month after Dorothy's death, at his home in Sedgwick, Maine; he was 92.[4]
Books
- (1958) Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels[17]
- (1963) The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers[18]
- (1965) Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers[19]
- (1968) The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy[20]
- (1970) Thomas Hardy, Distance and Desire[21]
- (1971) Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank[22]
- (1982) Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels[23]
- (1985) The Linguistic Moment: from Wordsworth to Stevens[24]
- (1985) The Lesson of Paul de Man[25]
- (1987) The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin[26]
- (1990) Versions of Pygmalion[27]
- (1990) Victorian Subjects[28]
- (1990) Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth Century Literature[29]
- (1991) Theory Now and Then[30]
- (1991) Hawthorne & History: Defacing It[31]
- (1992) Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines[32]
- (1992) Illustration[33]
- (1995) Topographies[34]
- (1998) Reading Narrative[35]
- (1999) Black Holes[36]
- (2001) Others[37]
- (2001) Speech Acts in Literature[38]
- (2002) On Literature[39]
- (2005) The J. Hillis Miller Reader[40]
- (2005) Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James[41]
- (2009) The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida, and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies[42]
- (2009) For Derrida[43]
- (2011) The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz[44]
- (2012) Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited[45]
- (2014) Communities in Fiction[46]
- (2015) An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China[47]
- (2016) Thinking Literature Across Continents (with Ranjan Ghosh)
See also
- List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
- The logic technique of Ariadne's thread
Further reading
- Robert Magliola. Appendix ii, in Derrida on the Mend. W. Lafayette: Purdue Univ. Press, 1983; 1984; rpt. 2000. Magliola, pp. 176–187, demonstrates deconstructive literary criticism as it was practiced in the U.S.A. circa 1970s-1980s, but also argues that J. Hillis Miller seems not to exploit the full implications of Derridean deconstruction (see in particular pp. 176–77 and 186-87).
References
- ^ "Miller, J. Hillis (Joseph Hillis), 1928–". Library of Congress. Retrieved July 22, 2014.
b. 3/5/28
- ^ Harriman, Pat (February 13, 2021). "Remembering Distinguished Professor Emeritus J. Hillis Miller". UCI News. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
- ^ J. Hillis Miller Jr., On Literature (Routledge, 2002), p. 142.
- ^ ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 14, 2021.
- ^ a b Vincent B. Leitch, ed., (2001). The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. "Georges Poulet". New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 1318–1319.
- ^ a b Vincent B. Leitch (Ed.). (2001). The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. "Cleanth Brooks" 1352.
- ^ "Deconstruction, by Mitchell Stephens CJR, Sept/Oct 91". Archived from the original on October 3, 2006.
- ^ "Today@UCI: Press Releases". February 1, 2006. Archived from the original on February 1, 2006.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved June 15, 2021.
- ^ "About J. Hillis Miller". Archived from the original on September 7, 2006.
- ^ "UCI E&CL Faculty Profile". Archived from the original on March 15, 2015. Retrieved January 31, 2006.
- ^ a b "In memoriam". www.humanities.uci.edu. Retrieved February 14, 2021.
- ^ "English Language & Literature". Brock University.
- ISBN 978-1472527707. Retrieved January 27, 2018.
- ^ Risen, Clay (February 13, 2021). "J. Hillis Miller, 92, Dies; Helped Revolutionize Literary Studies". The New York Times.
- ^ Totally gutted to hear about J. Hillis Miller’s passing from complications of COVID. He was always my model as a teacher, scholar, and above all, as a professional. So incredibly sad.
- OCLC 475936034.
- JSTOR 3721212.
- ISSN 0013-8215.
- OCLC 437159.
- OCLC 901966420.
- OCLC 1171551835.
- OCLC 824649574.
- OCLC 892525680.
- OCLC 54689313.
- OCLC 242180739.
- OCLC 434546447.
- OCLC 797604262.
- OCLC 797496522.
- OCLC 749340432.
- OCLC 803308783.
- OCLC 1150412094.
- ISBN 978-0-674-44357-0.
- ISBN 978-0-8047-2379-4.
- OCLC 43477036.
- OCLC 39765597.
- ISBN 978-0-691-22405-3.
- ISBN 978-0-8047-4216-0.
- ISBN 978-1-134-50760-3.
- OCLC 1145341150.
- OCLC 921851699.
- OCLC 939012510.
- OCLC 609788716.
- S2CID 191668814.
- OCLC 795695186.
- ISBN 978-0-8232-6310-3, retrieved February 14, 2021
- ISBN 978-0-8101-3163-7.
External links
Archival collections
- Guide to the J. Hillis Miller Papers. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
- Guide to the Barbara Cohen Manuscript Materials. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
- [1] Nidesh Lawtoo and J. Hillis Miller, The Critic and the Mime: J. Hillis Miller in Dialogue with Nidesh Lawtoo, The Minnesota Review, 95.
- Miller's webpage at the University of California at Irvine
- Recording of interview with Miller at the UCD Humanities Institute
- Interview with Miller about his recent book The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz on "New Books in Critical Theory"
Documentary
- First Sail: J Hillis Miller – Documentary film by Dragan Kujundžić