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J. Hillis Miller

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Template:Short description Template:About Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox academic Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. (March 5, 1928 – February 7, 2021)<ref name=Congress>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, Miller was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using principles of deconstruction.

Early lifeEdit

Miller was born in Newport News, Virginia, on March 5, 1928, to Nell Martin (née Crizer) and J. Hillis Miller Sr.<ref>J. Hillis Miller Jr., On Literature (Routledge, 2002), p. 142.</ref><ref name=":0">Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref name=":0" />

Miller graduated from Oberlin College (BA summa cum laude, 1948) switching his major of study from Physics to English.<ref name=":0" /> He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to start his masters at Harvard University. During this time, he contracted polio and was noted to have completed his dissertation writing with his left hand, having lost the ability to use his right hand.<ref name=":0" /> He completed his masters from the university in 1949 and his PhD in 1952.<ref name=":0" />

CareerEdit

Miller started his career as a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in 1953.<ref name=":0" /> 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."<ref name=":1">Vincent B. Leitch, ed., (2001). The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. "Georges Poulet". New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 1318–1319.</ref> 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.<ref name=":0" />

In 1972, he joined the faculty at Yale University where he taught for fourteen years. At Yale, he worked alongside prominent literary critics Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, where they were collectively known as the Yale School of deconstruction, in contention with prominent Yale influence theorist Harold Bloom.<ref name=":2">Vincent B. Leitch (Ed.). (2001). The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. "Cleanth Brooks" 1352.</ref><ref name=":0" />

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.<ref name=":1" /> At a time, he was supervising at least 14 doctoral dissertations studying Victorian literature and novels.<ref name=":0" />

In 1986, Miller left Yale to work at the University of California Irvine, where he was later followed by his Yale colleague Derrida.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> During the same year, he served as president of the Modern Language Association, and was honored by the MLA with a lifetime achievement award in 2005.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 2004, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Both at Yale and UC Irvine, Miller mentored an entire generation of American literary critics including noted queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine until 2001.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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 UC Irvine, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Queensland.<ref name=":3">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Role as a deconstructionistEdit

Miller was associated with a group of scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, collectively referred to as the Yale School, who advanced deconstruction, an analytical approach of associating and drawing linkages between literary text and the associated meaning. The theory espoused that words and texts had linkages to other expressed words and texts. These built on ideas and themes that Derrida and de Man had brought along from Europe, while Miller joined them.<ref name=":0" /> He applied these techniques to a range of American and British works, including prose as well as poetry. Throughout his career, he would go on to write over 35 books and many articles in journals advancing these themes.<ref name=":0" />

Miller defined the movement as searching for "the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all",<ref name=":2" /><ref name=":0" /> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref name=":0" /> 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.<ref name=":0" /> 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.<ref name=":3" />

He was also a defender of the movement in the late 1980s when the field was losing some of its popularity.<ref name=":0" /> 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.<ref name=":0" />

Personal lifeEdit

Miller married Dorothy James in 1949, and remained married until her death in January 2021. The couple had two daughters and a son.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Miller died from COVID-19<ref>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.</ref> on February 7, 2021, the month after Dorothy's death, at his home in Sedgwick, Maine; he was 92.<ref name=":0" />

BooksEdit

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See alsoEdit

ReferencesEdit

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Further readingEdit

  • 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).

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Archival collectionsEdit

DocumentaryEdit

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