J. Hillis Miller

Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. (March 5, 1928 – February 7, 2021) was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, Miller was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using principles of deconstruction.

Early life Miller was born in Newport News, Virginia, on March 5, 1928, to Nell Martin (née Crizer) and J. Hillis Miller Sr. His mother was a homemaker and his father a Baptist minister who was professor of psychology at the College of William & Mary, and would go on to serve as the president of the University of Florida. This was also the time that he was introduced to Paul de Man, who was a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins as well as Jacques Derrida, a visiting professor, with whom he would remain associated. During the same year, he served as President of the Modern Language Association, and was honored by the MLA with a lifetime achievement award in 2005. In 2004, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. Both at Yale and UC Irvine, Miller mentored an entire generation of American literary critics including noted queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. He was Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine until 2001.

After his retirement, he wrote over 15 books and many articles in journals and was also active on the international lecturing circuit. He also served on dissertation committees in his retirement supervising dissertations and doctoral theses works at UC Irvine, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Queensland.

Role as a deconstructionist Miller was associated with a group of scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, collectively referred to as the Yale School, who advanced deconstruction, an analytical approach of associating and drawing linkages between literary text and the associated meaning. The theory espoused that words and texts had linkages to other expressed words and texts. These built on ideas and themes that Derrida and de Man had brought along from Europe, while Miller joined them. Miller's "The Critic as Host" could be viewed as a reply to M. H. Abrams, who presented a paper, "The Deconstructive Angel," at a session of the Modern Language Association in December 1976, criticizing deconstruction and the methods of Miller. Miller presented his paper just after Abrams's presentation at the same session. He made the case that words and text lacking objective outside or providing meaning didn't mean they were the "prison-house of language," but, instead, they were a "place of joy" where the critics had the freedom to associate and provide various possibilities eventually guiding the meaning. Miller died from COVID-19 on February 7, 2021, the month after Dorothy's death, at his home in Sedgwick, Maine; he was 92. (1963) The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1965) Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1968) The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (1970) Thomas Hardy, Distance and Desire (1971) Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank (1982) Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1985) The Linguistic Moment: from Wordsworth to Stevens (1985) The Lesson of Paul de Man (1987) The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (1990) Versions of Pygmalion (1990) Victorian Subjects (1990) Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth Century Literature (1991) Theory Now and Then (1991) Hawthorne & History: Defacing It (1992) Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines (1992) Illustration (1995) Topographies (1998) Reading Narrative (1999) Black Holes (2001) Others (2001) Speech Acts in Literature (2002) On Literature (2005) The J. Hillis Miller Reader (2005) Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (2009) The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida, and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies (2009) For Derrida (2011) The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (2012) Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited (2014) Communities in Fiction (2015) An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China (2016) Thinking Literature Across Continents (with Ranjan Ghosh)