Excessive Images: Henry Miller and the French Surrealists

Theatre Journal, 2006

49th Parallel, Issue 38, May 2016.

2015

The aim of this thesis is to provide a new way of reading Henry Miller by drawing attention to his unlikely aesthetic and moral intersections with Ezra Pound. It traces the lineage of a particular strand of radical modernist expression that is exemplified in Pound’s critical essays between 1909 and 1938 and finds its way – incongruously - into Henry Miller’s semi-autobiographical novels of the 1930s. In the process, I will illuminate hitherto underexplored territory that is shared by two seemingly incompatible writers, pointing the way to a better understanding of the aesthetic and moral contradictions in Miller’s – and indeed Pound’s – work. Crucially, I propose that Miller’s literature is morally engaged rather than amoral or unwittingly counter-revolutionary, two common and reductive assumptions. By reading him in the context of Pound’s often suspect pronouncements on hierarchy and order it is possible to reassess George Orwell’s widely accepted conclusion that Miller is simply a...

Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 48 (2000): 281-85

Boox RBwnws 281 disingenuous and defensive. Though he describes Foucault's work as brilliant at one point (170, n. 89), he merely mentions it in passing; Baudrillard's work is dismissed in a note simply as "caricature" (155 n. 38); Said's critique of the appropriative effect of nineteenth-century Egyptology is described as "daft" (I41 n. 10); and Adorno is invoked simply a "colour of the month" (23). Had Sparshott engaged this critical tradition more seriously, his analysis of empire as an information system might have been situated more clearly in contemporary debates on that topic, and, more importantly, the potential force of his connections among aesthetics, axiology, and social practice may have emerged more clearly for a wider range of readers.

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2010

I am sitting here reading a poet. There are many people in the room, but they are all inconspicuous; they are inside the books.

The Minnesota Review, 2020

This interview with J. Hillis Miller takes one of the most influential concepts in Western aesthetics (mimēsis) as an Ariadne’s thread to revisit the major turns in Miller’s careerlong engagement with literary theory and criticism, and, by extension to revisit literary history as well. Complicating standard accounts of deconstruction and rhetorical reading as simply anti-mimetic, Miller acknowledges the centrality of this ancient concept to his intellectual development and to major turns in literary theory as well: From his early engagement with New Criticism and phenomenology in the 1950s, to his encounter with Jacques Derrida and deconstruction in the 1960s, to his development of rhetorical reading in the company of Paul de Man in the 70s and 80s, to his engagement with ethics and community in 1990s and 2000s, stretching to include his most recent critical reflections on contemporary US politics and the new media that disseminate it, this interview progressively reveals how mimēsis functions as a protean concept, or mime, that, under different conceptual masks, is constantly at play in Miller’s dialogic relation with literary history, old and new. Staged as a dialogue, Miller and Lawtoo join forces to show that this often-marginalized literary-philosophical concept takes center stage in the political, ethical, scientific, technological transformations that cast a shadow on present and future generations.

Journal of Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, 2008

This article investigates the work of Henry Miller in relation to Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of a minor literature. It examines several passages from Miller's work in detail, demonstrating how his writing subverts the major language of English under which it operates. Language is exposed, and exploited, as instable and dynamic through a writing style that rests on the periphery of conventional functionality. Miller's seemingly mundane prose at once becomes fragmented and fluidic, surprising the reader into no longer engaging with the text as a straightforward and transparent construct but as a reexamination of the inherent complexity, and ultimate impossibility, of such a project. Miller's style defies literary expectations of pre-existing genres. It undermines the presumptuous and banal definitions ascribed to the purpose of writing and instead permits it to remain an activity that is definable and perpetuated only by its very resistance to concretization, encouraging new and marginal, or perhaps "minor," forms of writing.

2015

Conradiana , 2018

The disappearance of J. Hillis Miller left a yawning void among the community of literacy critics and theorists around the world, but the traces of his admirable readings live on and remain to be followed up. Professor Miller was, in fact, a brilliant teacher, an inspiring scholar, a generous and cherished friend, and, last but not least, an exemplary reader of literary and theoretical texts. As a Victorianist by training who soon transgressed antiquarian disciplinary boundaries, he had a special philological interest in modernism in general and in Joseph Conrad in particular. As he explains in his Introduction to Reading Conrad (edited by John Peters and Jakob Lothe), when he was thirteen or so he accidentally found a copy of Conrad's Typhoon in his father's library that cast a lifelong spell on his imagination-a spell so long that it will lead him to end his career with a performative promise about Typhoon. Early on, then, Conrad stood out for J. Hillis Miller, occupying a privileged place in his distinguished intellectual trajectory-beginning, middle, and end. One of the most influential critics and theorists of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, J. Hillis Miller started reading fiction early. As he explains in his last interview, he "taught [him]self to read at the age of five" (Lawtoo, "Critic" 97) so he could read children's books like Winnie the Pooh, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Alice in Wonderland-a formative experience that eventually led to an impressive, exploratory, and inimitable career in literary study. After obtaining a PhD in English Literature from Harvard University in an intellectual environment that was "actively hostile to literary theory" (98), as he recalls, Miller's critical and theoretical work took off with his engagement with New Criticism and phenomenology at The Johns Hopkins University, where he befriended Georges Poulet and first encountered Jacques Derrida, continued at Yale where he became an influential advocate of the "Yale School of Deconstruction" along with Derrida, Paul de Man, and Geoffrey Hartman, and culminated at the University of California, Irvine, where he contributed to the ethical turn by developing untimely readings on the importance of literature, reading, and community. After his retirement as Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in 2002, Miller continued to write numerous books. In his

49th Parallel, 2017

Henry Miller has long been an outlying twentieth-century American author, and has often been criticised for the alterations of his personal history in his semi-autobiographical novels. Biographers of Miller have attempted to unravel the intentional misrepresentation in Miller’s novels without fully explaining why the author would choose to dissemble and yet simultaneously state that his works were truthful accounts of his life. This article explores the significance that author identity held for Miller by re-examining the economic difficulties he faced in attempting to publish. I contend that Miller’s real world ability to bullshit enabled him to enliven his texts with an enhanced image of himself in order to successfully market his literary output; in doing so, the narrative form constructed out of Miller-the-author’s monetary struggles is shown to directly play out in Miller-the-narrator’s identity. To support this argument, I examine Miller’s perspective on lying and its function in art and conclude that Miller’s habit of biographical distortion proved an economically viable method for reaching his readers.

A book review of The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, originally published in European Journal of American Studies, December 2016

Published in The First Ten Years of English Studies in Split, eds. Sanja Čurković Kalebić and Brian Willems. Split: University of Split, 2011.

DELTA: Studies on Henry Miller, Anais Nin and Lawrence Durrell, 2021

In his later years, Henry Miller often dwelt on recollections concerning the origins of his fascination with Japan. His self-proclaimed interest in Japan, at times, reached an almost comical level of devotion. In this article, I briefly examine the broader significance of Japonisme—the impact of Japanese art on Western art— in Miller^ artistic output; in doing so, I argue that the impact of Japanese art and culture on Miller’s life can be readily discerned.2) After achieving global fame，in interviews Miller occasionally turned his attention to Japan, attempting to recreate in his mind’s eye the route through which his attention was first drawn to that distant land. In an unpublished interview between Evelyn Hinz and Miller during the late 1970s, he recounts witn specific detail his germinal interest in painting watercolors. The following quote, I believe, sets the foundation for the subsequent argument that Miller should be included among the list of artists who demonstrate a specific influence derived from Japanese culture and artistry.