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“A major work on Henry James, on speech act theory, and on the thinking
of Jacques Derrida. . . . Miller’s >consideration of what we do when we read
begins to make the true strangeness of that activity evident. What does it mean
to say we really have just these words on the page, that nothing can answer for
the text except the text? I love the way the author takes nothing for granted.
What happens when a reader reads the words before her? In what sense do
these words have reference? What speech acts make these words a work of
fiction?”—Julie Rivkin, Connecticut College
“The appearance of any work by J. Hillis Miller is a major event in literary
and cultural studies. Literature as Conduct is one of the best books on James we
have and are likely ever to have.”—Sheila Teahan, Michigan State University
"Densely argued and challenging..."—Choice The work of a master critic writing at the peak of his powers, this magisterial
book draws on speech act theory, as it originated with J. L. Austin and was
further developed by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, to investigate the many
dimensions of doing things with words in James’s fiction.
Three modes of speech act occur in James’s novels. First, James’s writing of his
fictions is performative. He puts on paper words that have the power to raise in
the reader the phantoms of imaginary persons. Second, James’s writing does
things with words that do other things in their turn, including conferring on
the reader responsibility for further judgment and action: for example, teaching
James’s novels or writing about them. Finally, the narrators and characters in
James’s fictions utter speech acts that are forms of doing things with words—
promises, declarations, excuses, denials, acts of bearing witness, lies, decisions
publicly attested, and the like. The action of each work by James, he shows, is
brought about by its own idiosyncratic repertoire of speech acts.
In careful readings of six major examples, “The Aspern Papers,” The Portrait
of a Lady, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and
The Sense of the Past, Miller demonstrates the value of speech act theory for
reading literature.
| J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor at the University
of California at Irvine. One of the most recent many books is Speech Acts
in Literature. |
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