<p>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.</p>

On Literature (Thinking in Action)

Literature & Fiction

Hillis Miller, J.

History & Criticism

Routledge

This book brings together essays by J. Hillis Miller on eight major 20th-century authors: Lawrence, Kafka, Stevens, Williams, Woolf, Hardy Conrad, and James. For all their evident differences, these essays, from early to late, explore a single intuition about literature. The formulation of this emerges with increasing clarity. The intuition may be framed by three words: "trope", "parable", "performative". Each essay here attempts to formulate what it is in a given case that the reader performatively enters by the way of parabolic trope.

Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-century Literature

Pearson Professional Education

"Theory now and then" brings together the more overtly theoretical essays by J.Hillis Miller published between 1966 and 1989. Included here are review essays on other theorists' work - George Poulet and the rest of the "Geneva critics": Joseph Riddel, Edward Said, Meyer Abrams; Jacques Derrida and the other critics of the "Yale School" with whom Miller was associated: Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom. Among the essays are also affirmations made over the years of Miller's own theoretical presuppositions. But in Miller's view, theory is nothing without praxis. Exemplary readings punctuate these essays, not only the readings of the theorists themselves, where the presupposition is that works of theory must be read as carefully and scrupulously as literary works, but also readings of texts by Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.

Theory Now and Then

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Books by Hillis Miller, J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hillis Miller, J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

On Literature (Thinking in Action)

Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-century Literature

Theory Now and Then