This is the story of an artist who fails to find the perfect union although he falls in love with three generations of the same family. The text is accompanied by a critical introduction.

The Well-beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament (New Wessex Editions)

J. Hillis Miller

Thomas, Hardy

Macmillan

Narrative Endings (Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Special Issue, Vol. 33, No. 1)

VARIOUS

Literature & Fiction

University of California Press

Reading Narrative

University of Oklahoma Press

The author shows, through a close reading of Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil", how a text can offer unsolicited answers and reveal its linguistic ruses to close scrutiny and how such a reading can bear on contemporary debates about canon formation, the university curriculum and the place of literary studies in the late 20th century. The book includes an interview with the author, an increasingly prominent figure in American critical theory.

Hawthorne & history: Defacing it (The Bucknell lectures in literary theory)

B. Blackwell

Book by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller

Deconstruction and Criticism

Jacques Derrida

PAUL DE MAN

harold-bloom

Geoffrey Hartman

Continuum Pub Group

Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James

The work of a master critic writing at the peak of his powers, this magisterial book draws on speech act theory, as it originated with J. L. Austin and was further developed by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, to investigate the many dimensions of doing things with words in James’s fiction.
Three modes of speech act occur in James’s novels. First, James’s writing of his fictions is performative. He puts on paper words that have the power to raise in the reader the phantoms of imaginary persons. Second, James’s writing does things with words that do other things in their turn, including conferring on the reader responsibility for further judgment and action: for example, teaching James’s novels or writing about them. Finally, the narrators and characters in James’s fictions utter speech acts that are forms of doing things with words― promises, declarations, excuses, denials, acts of bearing witness, lies, decisions publicly attested, and the like. The action of each work by James, he shows, is brought about by its own idiosyncratic repertoire of speech acts.
In careful readings of six major examples, “The Aspern Papers,” The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Sense of the Past, Miller demonstrates the value of speech act theory for reading literature. J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Irvine. One of the most recent many books is Speech Acts in Literature.

History & Criticism

Fordham University Press

For Derrida

This book―the culmination of forty years of friendship between J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida, during which Miller also closely followed all Derrida’s writings and seminars―is “for Derrida” in two senses. It is “for him,” dedicated to his memory. The chapters also speak, in acts of reading, as advocates for Derrida’s work. They focus especially on Derrida’s late work, including passages from the last, as yet unpublished, seminars. The chapters are “partial to Derrida,” on his side, taking his part, gratefully submitting themselves to the demand made by Derrida’s writings to be read―slowly, carefully, faithfully, with close attention to semantic detail.The chapters do not progress forward to tell a sequential story. They are, rather, a series of perspectives on the heterogeneity of Derrida’s work, or forays into that heterogeneity.The chief goal has been, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, “plainly to propound” what Derrida says. The book aims, above all, to render Derrida’s writings justice. It should be remembered, however, that, according to Derrida himself, every rendering of justice is also a transformative interpretation. A book like this one is not a substitute for reading Derrida for oneself. It is to be hoped that it will encourage readers to do just that.

This book―the culmination of forty years of friendship between J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida, during which Miller also closely followed all Derrida’s writings and seminars―is “for Derrida” in two senses. It is “for him,” dedicated to his memory. The chapters also speak, in acts of reading, as advocates for Derrida’s work. They focus especially on Derrida’s late work, including passages from the last, as yet unpublished, seminars. The chapters are “partial to Derrida,” on his side, taking his part, gratefully submitting themselves to the demand made by Derrida’s writings to be read―slowly, carefully, faithfully, with close attention to semantic detail.
The chapters do not progress forward to tell a sequential story. They are, rather, a series of perspectives on the heterogeneity of Derrida’s work, or forays into that heterogeneity.
The chief goal has been, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, “plainly to propound” what Derrida says. The book aims, above all, to render Derrida’s writings justice. It should be remembered, however, that, according to Derrida himself, every rendering of justice is also a transformative interpretation. A book like this one is not a substitute for reading Derrida for oneself. It is to be hoped that it will encourage readers to do just that.

Five essential and challenging essays by leading post-modern theorists on the art and nature of interpretation: Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller.

Geoffrey H. Hartman

History

Continuum Intl Pub Group

EPZ Deconstruction and Criticism (Continuum Impacts, 37)

Continuum

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Books by J. Hillis Miller