A01=Joseph Hillis Miller
Absurdity
Allegory
Allusion
Anthony Trollope
Anthropomorphism
Aphorism
Aporia
Appropriation (art)
Author_Joseph Hillis Miller
Autobiography
Catachresis
Category=DSA
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Consciousness
Criticism
E. M. Forster
Edmund Husserl
Emblem
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Feeling
Fiction
Genre
George Eliot
Howards End
Ideology
Irony
Jacques Derrida
Joseph Conrad
Kurtz (Heart of Darkness)
Literature
Louis Althusser
Marcel Proust
Metaphor
Mrs.
Narration
Narrative
Novel
Novelist
Oedipus the King
On Truth
Otherness (book)
Our Mutual Friend
Oxymoron
Pamphlet
Paul de Man
Performative utterance
Perjury
Poetry
Prosopopoeia
Pun
Racism
Rhetoric
Romanticism
Soren Kierkegaard
Speech act
Stupidity
Subjectivity
Suffering
Suggestion
Synecdoche
The Other Hand
The Resistance to Theory
The Secret Sharer
The Various
Theory
Thought
Uncertainty
Verisimilitude (fiction)
Victorian literature
W. B. Yeats
Wallace Stevens
Werner Hamacher
Wissenschaft
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691012230
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 21 Oct 2001
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This volume fulfills the author's career-long reflections on radical otherness in literature. J. Hillis Miller investigates otherness through ten nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors: Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, E. M. Forster, Marcel Proust, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. From the exquisite close readings for which he is celebrated, Miller reaps a capacious understanding of otherness--one reachable not through theory but through literature itself. Otherness has wide valence in contemporary literary and cultural studies and is often understood as a misconception by hegemonic groups of subaltern ones. In a pleasing counter to this, Others conceives of otherness as something that inhabits sameness. Instances of the "wholly other" within the familiar include your sense of self or your beloved, your sense of your culture as such, or your experience of literary, theoretical, and philosophical works that belong to your own culture--works that are themselves haunted by otherness.
Though Others begins and ends with chapters on theorists, the testimony they offer about otherness is not taken as more compelling than that of such literary works as Dicken's Our Mutual Friend, Conrad's "The Secret Sharer," Yeats's "Cold Heaven," or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Otherness, as this book finds it in the writers read, is not an abstract concept. It is an elusive feature of specific verbal constructs, different in each case. It can be glimpsed only through close readings that respect this diversity, as the plural in the title--Others--indicates. We perceive otherness in the way that the unseen--and the characters' emotional responses to it--ripples the conservative ideological surface of Howard's End. We sense it as chaos in Schlegel's radical concept of irony. And we gaze at it in the multiple personifications of Heart of Darkness. Each testifies in its own way to the richness and tangible weight of an otherness close at hand.
J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books, including Topographies, Reading Narrative, Ariadne's Thread, Versions of Pygmalion, and The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton).
