Joseph Hillis Miller

Uci Distinguished Professor Emeritus J Hillis Miller

Discusses the ethics of writing and reading fiction, the creation and action of characters, and works by Henry James, Melville, Heinrich von Kleist, and Maurice Blanchot

Versions of Pygmalion

A review of Dickens' works stressing the transformation of the real world of Dickens' experience into an imaginary one

The World of His Novels

Charles Dickens

Positioning himself in the slippery divide between two highly charged critical approaches--deconstruction and cultural studies--J. Hillis Miller explains why the split occurred and offers, for the first time, an eloquent analysis of the goals and methods of cultural studies. Miller's Illustration is an intellectual adventure that transgresses the boundaries of critical theory to reveal the ideological forces at work. The result, art critic Norman Bryson concludes, "is an extraordinary performance." In a positive, constructive way, Miller describes cultural studies as, primarily, a means of contextualizing works of art. Relating the assumptions behind this approach to recent social, political, and technological changes, he shows how cultural studies is itself subject to its context and thus perhaps misguided insofar as it portrays art objects as "mere illustration." In particular, Miller considers new forms of electronic research in the humanities which, with their vast, homogenizing effect on data, can compel a critic to reconfigure information--in fact, to create the context that he or she means simply to identify. To illustrate this phenomenon, Miller investigates one topic of importance for cultural studies: the relation of verbal and visual forms in multimedia works. Drawing examples from Twain, Gorey, Mallarme, James, Ruskin, Heidegger, Dickens, and Turner, he shows how neither word nor image takes priority in such collaborations; nor is either a mere representation of a pre-existing reality. The transformations wrought by cultural artifacts on their contexts, Miller contends, must be identified through detailed and vigilant "rhetorical" readings if the force of a work of art is to be passed on into the current cultural situation. And for the new form these readings take, the reader-critic must in turn assume responsibility.

Uci Distinguished Professor Emeritus J Hillis Miller

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