Literature as Conduct Speech Acts in Henry James J. Hillis Miller $75.00 ISBN: 9780823225385 Book (Hardcover) 376 pages September 2005 Quantity:

“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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