Theory Now and Then

"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.