J. Hillis Miller’s nuanced, precise, and detailed elaboration of speech acts in literature has encompassed, in addition to a volume of the same title (2001), at least The Ethics of Literature (1987), Versions of Pygmalion (1990), and Topographies (1995). The longawaited appearance of Literature as Conduct is notable as a current update and consummation of certain theoretical issues into which he has delved over a significant stretch of his remarkably generative career, questions relating to the conceptual, rhetorical, representational, and ethical conditions under which literature is at once possible, felicitous, and impossible. The volume at the same time orchestrates a meticulous and multi-tiered encounter with Henry James’s mature fiction in all the exasperations, rewards, ethical quandaries, communications blackouts, confirmations of existential predicaments, and literary and theoretical educations encrypted in its astute reading. Each reading with which Miller emerges is author.
See Full PDF See Full PDFThe influence of aestheticism on James’s late style has often been taken to exemplify a proto-modernist fictional mode that teaches readers to suspend ethical judgment, refusing the clarity of predetermined thought for the ambiguity of surprised feeling. This paper defends a more philosophical view of Jamesian ethics that accounts for his novels’ totalizing impulses towards abstraction, systematization, and thought. In keeping with James’s description of The Ambassadors as a “fusion of synthesis and picture,” it examines how the novel uses its character system not only to disrupt ethical categories but to synthetically construct and analyze them. By systematically juxtaposing Strether’s ethos of imaginative exploration alongside Mrs. Newsome’s administrative efficiency, Chad Newsome’s polished suavity, and Maria Gostrey’s discriminating synthesis, the novel both informs and challenges the ethical judgments of its characters, and by extension, its readers. By inviting readers to perceive the contrast between the judgments of characters as they evaluate the social world, James’s novel does not disrupt structures of thought with immediate feeling, so much as it shapes immediate feelings into structures of thought.
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Behavioral Paradigms in the Short Fiction of Henry James: An Intersubjective Approach
The short fiction of Henry James offers an ideal ground for character studies, in particular the investigation of interactional paradigms, from an intersubjective perspective. Some of James’ characters are clearly defined in terms of how they perceive themselves and the others, whether they recognize other perspectives than their own, or not; whether they open onto Others, or not; whether they are touched by Others, or not. Other characters bear gendered marks of language behavior, normative or transgressive styles of speaking. In this study the author explores these two major interactional paradigms in James’ short fiction, grounding the discussion in intersubjective theory, providing, along the way, an overview of the relevant claims of intersubjective theory that are appled throughout.
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Henry James in context
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Journal of Victorian Culture
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The thesis opens with a short introduction setting forth my aims and reasons in choosing to work on dialogue in the short stories. It continues, in the first chapter, with a description of varieties of speech other than dialogue, of component parts of Jamesian dialogue, and of the two distinct types into which it falls. Chapter two demonstrates James's use of dialogue for purposes of characterisation, with a preliminary examination of his range of characters. In chapter three, the main types of Jamesian themes and 'atmospheres' are outlined and the ways in which these are brought out by means of dialogue. Chapter four describes the two kinds of action to be found in the tales, and an attempt is then made to prove that the most important of these two - psychological action - is often most effectively conveyed through dialogue, with the reasons for this. (The influence of the drama is also discussed.) The next chapter, on form, begins with a brief recapitulation of relevan.
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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.
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European journal of American studies
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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 "
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