Theory Now and Then

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Duke University Press, 1991 - Literary Criticism - 405 pages
Theory Now and Then contains the more overtly theoretical essays by J. Hillis Miller published between 1966 and 1989. These essays trace the trajectory of theory over the last thirty years in the United States: from the "Continental Shift" announced in the Yale Colloquium of 1965, through Miller's assimilation of the work of the Geneva Critics, to the shift to that "deconstruction in America" in which Miller played a conspicuous role.
Included here are review essays on other theorists' work: the Geneva Circle including Georges Poulet; Joseph Riddel, Edward Said, Meyer Abrams; and the critics of the "Yale School," such as Jacques Derrida and others, Paul De Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom, with whom Miller was associated. Exemplary readings of the theorists themselves, and of texts by Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams punctuate these essays.

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Contents

reflections on the Yale Colloquium
1
the criticism of Marcel Raymond Albert Béguin Georges Poulet Jean Rousset JeanPierre Richard and Jean Starobinski
13
Georges Poulets Criticism of identification
31
Literature and religion
63
Tradition and difference
79
Deconstructing the deconstructers
95
literary criticism
111
Stevens Rock and criticism as cure II
117
Gleichnis in Nietzsches Also Sprach Zarathustra
277
How deconstruction works
293
Presidents column
295
Responsibility and the joy? of teaching
297
The obligation to write
299
The future for the study of languages and literatures
302
The imperative to teach
305
The triumph of theory the resistance to reading and the question of the material base
309

Beginning with a text
133
The critic as host
143
the crossways of contemporary criticism
171
The function of rhetorical study at the present time
201
whats the difference?
217
deconstruction and the teaching of writing
227
Constructions in criticism
245
The search for grounds in literary study
263
The ethics of reading
329
Reading part of a paragraph in Allegories of Reading
341
Paul de Mans wartime writings
359
An open letter to Professor Jon Wiener
369
The function of literary theory at the present time
385
Index
395
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