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

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.