J. Hillis Miller and the Play of Literature - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook J. Hillis Miller and the Play of Literature write by Jonathan Locke Hart. This book was released on 2023-12-19. J. Hillis Miller and the Play of Literature available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book discusses the full sweep of the work of J. Hillis Miller, a great critic and theorist, from his earliest writing to his death in 2021 on poetry, fiction, drama, fiction, non-fiction -- and Miller's preference for close and careful reading of individual literary and critical works over abstract theory.
On Literature
On Literature - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook On Literature write by J. Hillis Miller. This book was released on 2003-09-02. On Literature available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
J. Hillis Miller and the Play of Literature
J. Hillis Miller and the Play of Literature - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook J. Hillis Miller and the Play of Literature write by Jonathan Locke Hart. This book was released on 2023-12-27. J. Hillis Miller and the Play of Literature available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This is the first book to discuss the full sweep of the work of J. Hillis Miller, from his earliest writing in the 1950s to those near the time of his death in February 2021 across the genres of his criticism and theory—poetry, fiction, drama, fiction, non-fiction. The book examines Miller’s preference for close and careful reading of individual literary and critical works over abstract theory. The study will discuss the member of the so-called Yale School of deconstruction to die but will see him as a reader and lover of literature, someone interested in Georges Poulet and phenomenology and in Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. Miller was concerned about many aspects of literature and life, including the pleasure of reading and writing as in climate change, which he saw as the crisis of our time. Miller was well known in humanities and literature worldwide, one of the greatest of modern critics and theorists.
Fiction and Repetition
Fiction and Repetition - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Fiction and Repetition write by J. Hillis Miller. This book was released on 1985-10-15. Fiction and Repetition available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Speech Acts in Literature
Speech Acts in Literature - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Speech Acts in Literature write by Joseph Hillis Miller. This book was released on 2001. Speech Acts in Literature available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
