Transgressing the Law of Literature

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."

Presentamos una extensa reseña y comentario del libro de J. Hillis Miller "Speech Acts in Literature", una importante obra de teoría literaria y comunicativa que expone y critica las teorías y prácticas de los actos de habla de J. L. Austin, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida y Marcel Proust. Las aportaciones de Hillis Miller se comentan a la luz de la teoría pragmática del significado y de la interpretación que hemos expuesto en otras publicaciones. Esta discusión es relevante para estudiosos de la lingüística así como para quienes se interesen por la hermenéutica, por la teoría de la recepción y por la ética de la literatura y de la crítica literaria. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Palabras clave: Pragmalingüística, Actos de habla, Hermenéutica, Teoría literaria, J. Hillis Miller, Teoría de la interpretación, Pragmática de la literatura, Teoría de la recepción, _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Speech Acts in Literature: A Review of J. Hillis Miller's Work (Actos de Habla en la Literatura: Reseña de J. Hillis Miller) This is an extensive review and commentary of J. Hillis Miller's book "Speech Acts in Literature", a major theoretical and critical work which discusses the speech act theory and practice of J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Marcel Proust. Hillis Miller's insights are discussed in the light of the pragmaticist theory of communicative interaction and of critical interpretation expounded elsewhere by J. A. García Landa. The discussion is relevant to students of linguistics and to those interested in hermeneutics, reader-response criticism and the ethics of literature and criticism. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note: PDF is in Spanish _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Keywords: Speech_acts, Pragmatics, Hillis_Miller, Austin, Derrida, de_Man, Interaction, Hermeneutics, Criticism, Interpretation

J. Hillis Miller is one of the premier literary critics in the American academy over the last half-century. He is a first-generation deconstructive critic. I studied with him in the 1960s at Johns Hopkins and then went a different way, toward cognitive science. This working paper consists three documents: 1) A letter to the editor (of PMLA) responding to Miller’s 1986 President’s address, 2) a long open letter from 2015 in which I discuss structuralism, cognitive science, and computational criticism, and 3) a chronology sketching out parallel developments in literary theory and cognitive science from the 1950s through the end of the century.

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.

The University of Nottingham, School of American and Canadian Studies, 2000

Journal of Humanities, 2008

Henry Miller's works, specifically the unofficial "Obelisk" trilogy and The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy, provoke questions concerning the representation of the visual in the literary text, as the inclusion of real and fictional paintings and painters in Miller's texts are frequent occurrences. Such widespread traces of painting in Miller's work mediate both the narrator and the reader's relation to the text and to the world and raise questions of the stability of language in depicting other forms of art. Indeed, through the narrator's experiences with these arts, the reader enters, by means of ekphrastic descriptions, the world of the depicted art to the extent that written language permits. In this article, I provide a mapping of the ways in which the act of painting surfaces in Miller's work, which I separate into three categories. I call the first notional ekphrasis, where episodes experienced by the narrator are described as if they could be paintings themselves or as resembling paintings that do not actually exist (that, in fact, Miller is creating in the passages). The second category involves the manner in which Miller refers to paintings and to painters in order better to articulate or depict an episode in his own text. In these passages the narrator suggests that the events around him, which he is incidentally describing, remind him of actual paintings or suggest to him that they could be, or should be, part of actual paintings. I term this writing function referential ekphrasis. Lastly, Miller describes himself in * Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Washington, Seattle 174 detail in the act of painting and refers to various elements concerning the process and the medium of painting, a form of writing that I dub active ekphrasis. Thus, by engaging in several rather complex and self-conscious forms of ekphrasis, Miller develops an innovative writing style that encourages the reader to reflect on the impossibility of language as a stable, communicative tool and to reconsider the act of writing as a straight-forward mode of representation, and instead to recognize that all language use is an ongoing mode of creation, blurring the lines between artistic mediums and the expectations from those mediums.

2015