Henry Miller's Economical Need to Bullshit

Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, Volume Ten

This is an overview of Henry Miller's work and broad significance as a writer. It examines the key components of his style which contributed to his status as a literary iconoclast, vis-à-vis the notion of modernism.—"His works were part of a life-long quest in the continuous discovery and construction of a mythology of the self through literature, the function of which is to expose corrupt values at the heart of the modern spirit and awaken the reader to the possibilities of a life which is equated with art."

Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, 2010

This article grows out of a feeling that, over the past ten years or so, the concept of story has become distinctly too comfortable. Ideas that once seemed crisp and provocative (e.g. "The truth of a story lies in its meaning, not in its accuracy", "We are all storytelling animals", "Stories are repositories of knowledge" etc.) have assumed the standing of unquestioned truths, almost 'facts', in Latour's view. Moreover, I have come to view some of the current 'controversies', notably over performance versus text, as diversions from more problematic aspects of the use of stories in organizational research. The purpose here to reproblematize the idea of narrative, to recover its recalcitrant and even dangerous qualities once more and point out some consequences of their seductive powers. In particular, I would like to argue that stories can be vehicles of contestation and opposition but also of oppression, easily slipping into hegemonic discourses; furthermore, that they can be vehicles to enlightenment and understanding but also to dissimulation and lying; and finally, that they do not obliterate or deny the existence of facts but allow facts to be re-interpreted and embellished-this makes stories particularly dangerous devices in the hands of image-makers, hoaxers and spin doctors. Stories have recently emerged as criticism-free zones, affording their authors an immunity from many requirements that apply to other narratives and texts. It is time, in my view, to withdraw this immunity. Neither stories, nor experiences are above academic criticism, challenge and contestation.

Philosophy and Literature, 2022

Some infamous memoirs have turned out to be chock-full of fibs. Should we care? Why not say—as many have—that all autobiography is fiction, that accurate memory is impossible, that we start lying as soon as we start narrating, and that it doesn’t matter anyway, since made-up stories are just as good as true ones? Because, well, every part of that is misleading. First, we don’t misremember absolutely everything; second, we have other sources to draw on; third, story form affects only significance, not facts; fourth, fiction and nonfiction offer different affordances, benefits, and delights. And since we need both kinds of writing, we have to insist on honesty in memoir; we have to stop saying that everything is invention and that fibs don’t matter. If memoirs could never be trusted, who would still read them? In a world without truth, what exactly would we speak to power?

London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014

The biographical novel has become a dominant literary form in recent years. But why? I interviewed prominent biographical novelists such as Michael Cunningham, Joyce Carol Oates, Julia Alvarez, Russell Banks, and Anita Diamant to get some answers. I have attached my introduction to the book, and the book contains my interviews with the authors. I am currently working on a new book of interviews with biographical novelists from across the globe. Bloomsbury will publish that book in late 2018, and it includes interviews with Colm Toibin, Emma Donoghue, Colum McCann, David Ebershoff, Chika Unigwe, Sabina Murray, Rosa Montero, David Lodge, Susan Sellers, Laurent Binet, and many others.

The coalescence of literary journalism as a genre in the late 20th century gave rise to a particular manifestation of the uncanny, experienced by writers and readers alike. In this paper I explore the role of the uncanny—the peculiar disquiet Freud associated with that which is simultaneously alien and familiar—in literary journalism, by examining three book-length examples from the genre: Emmanuel Carrère’s work, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, and Matthew Finkel’s True Story: Memoir, Murder, and Mea Culpa. All three works draw explicit parallels between the authors’ journalistic projects and the hoaxes perpetrated by their protagonists—a comparison that suggests the blurring of the boundary between author and real-life subject that lies at the heart of literary journalism’s particular uncanny aesthetic.

Biography, 2005

Marketing the Author brings together a collection of essays that explore the role of the author as agent in creating his or her own literary personae. Through the lens of biography the ten contributors attempt to historicize Michel Foucault's provocative question: "What is an Author?" The answer, according to Marysa Demoor's "Introduction," can be found in the late nineteenth century, when the status of the author began to shift to accommodate changes in the literary marketplace. The collection makes two significant contributions to the study of intellectual biography. First, it problematizes gender in the creation of both public and private identities. Second, it seeks to redefine the modernist moment by comparing the lived experience of canonical and non-canonical writers. Stephen Greenblatt's highly influential Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1980) inspires the new historicist approach of this collection. His concept of "self-fashioning" directly informs many of the authors in this collection, who essentially apply his Renaissance formulation to the modern period. Within this framework the book attempts, in part, to locate the roots of modernism in late Victorian society. The essays in this collection put the author front and center. Improved literacy and cheaper printing technologies resulted in an increased appetite for print during the late nineteenth century. As a result, authors developed a newfound ability to fashion their own professional and personal identities. This was particularly true it seems for female authors. Elizabeth Mansfield, Talia Shaffer, and Linda K. Hughes all examine women writers who crafted an authorial identity out of the patriarchal world around them. In her study of Emilia Dilke in chapter one, Mansfield concludes that "regardless of their biological sex, Victorian women could modify their intellectual or rhetorical gender" (32). Shaffer's study of Lucas Malet in chapter four attempts "to show how difficult it was to achieve an independent identity" for the late Victorian woman writer (73). At the same time, she demonstrates how Malet attempted "to invent a different model of female authorship" (74) by among other things, adopting a masculinist personae and "refus(ing) to be a sequel" to the career of her more famous father, Charles Kingsley (88). In chapter seven, Hughes explores the career of Rosamund Marriott Watson, and argues that women writers, in this case a poet, could be resourceful within the bounds of a pervasive and highly restrictive Victorian gender ideology.

2016

In three recent pieces, one article and two interviews, J. Hilis Miller looks back over the five decades of his career, affirms the continuing importance of ethical education in literary studies, but also the need to literary studies to change as other media take the role that writing once played. Critics must find patterns in texts and explicate them.

49th Parallel, Issue 38, May 2016.