Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/40466672/To_J._Hillis_Miller_2019_On_the_State_of_Literary_Criticism
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Abstract: J. Hillis Miller is one of the premier literary critics in the American academy over the last half-century. He is a first-generation deconstructive critic. I studied with him in the 1960s at Johns Hopkins and then went a different way, toward cognitive science. This working paper consists three documents: 1) A letter to the editor (of PMLA) responding to Miller’s 1986 President’s address, 2) a long open letter from 2015 in which I discuss structuralism, cognitive science, and computational criticism, and 3) a chronology sketching out parallel developments in literary theory and cognitive science from the 1950s through the end of the century.
Contents
J. Hillis Miller, at Johns Hopkins and beyond 3
Response to the President’s Address, 1986: On the Demise of Deconstruction 4
Paths Not Taken: An Open Letter to J. Hillis Miller 5
A Fork in the Road 5
Heart of Darkness 6
Apocalypse Now 8
Myth and Form 9
Literary Culture and History 10
The Land Before Us 14
Appendix: A Parallel Chronology of Literary Theory and Cognitive Science 15
J. Hillis Miller, at Johns Hopkins and beyond
In my first semester at Johns Hopkins I took a course on the modern British novel. It was taught by J. Hillis Miller. I can’t say that I remember much about him, after all, 1966 was awhile ago. I do remember that the course was taught in one of those amphitheater style lecture halls, a rather old one. And I remember three of the texts we read: E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (a revelation), Henry James, The Ambassadors (a snore), Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (???) – there must have been a half dozen more, but I don’t recall what they were.
I remember a bit more about the graduate seminar I audited in the fall of 1969. By that time, of course, I’d become acclimated to literary criticism at Hopkins, having taken courses with D. C. Allen, Don Howard, and Earl Wasserman in English and a handful of courses with Dick Macksey in the Humanities Center. This was three years after the infamous 1966 structuralism conference and things were hoppin’. The course was the Victorian novel. I specifically remember reading Trollop (The Last Chronicle of Barset) and Dickens (Bleak House). I also remember the graduate students asking him about going to the MLA convention. Miller offered some dismissive remarks about the intellectual proceedings but suggested the “meatmeet market” aspect had some value (for them). Given that Hopkins was in the vanguard of work in critical theory Miller’s attitude was natural.
A decade-and-a-half later, 1986, Miller was giving the annual Presidential Address at the MLA convention: “The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base.” Over the course of a decade and a half Miller had gone from the outskirts of the profession to the apex, from being an outsider storming the ramparts to commanding the heights and noting that the revolution, alas, seems to have disintegrated.
His theme was the eclipse of deconstruction in favor of a turn toward “toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context.” I don’t recall whether or not I attended the MLA convention that year – I would have been job hunting – but I didn’t hear the address. I did read it, though, when it was published in PMLA.
By that time I was effectively out of the profession. I had been unable to make it through/over structuralism to deconstruction. Back in the early 1970s that was of little significance. Structuralism didn’t know that it was dead and Prof. Miller was happy to write a letter of recommendation for me based on my master’s thesis, which was a structuralist analysis of “Kubla Khan”. That letter, and a couple of others (certainly one from Dick Macksey), took me to the English Department at SUNY Buffalo. There I went over the river and through the woods to the Linguistics Department where I went from structuralism to computational linguistics under the tutelage of David Hays.
That was, and is, an intellectually plausible move. But professionally, my goose was cooked, though it took a few years for me to figure that out. The intellectual openness that had characterized the 1960s and 1970s was gone and the profession was shrink-wrapping itself around “history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context,” to repeat Miller’s phrase.
I was a bit surprised hear him assert that deconstruction was waning; (faux?) deconstruction seemed to be all over the place. If it was on the way out, though, that was fine by me. I wrote a letter to PMLA in which I offered a generational-succession account of deconstruction’s demise. That letter is reproduced below.
The idea is simple. Critics of Miller’s generation had to work to earn their rebellion from mid-century critical routines. Subsequent generations simply learned rebellion from that initial generation, though they may have donned different hats or masks to assert their difference/différance. But the thrill was gone, hence deconstruction’s demise.
And so it goes. Miller went his way and I went mine. He’s retired and I’m still scrounging about in the hinterlands and conducting the occasional guerilla raid on the folk in that gritty city on the hill.
Back in 2015 I decided to address at open letter to Miller. I’d done this several times before (and since). While some people have replied to such open letters (Steven Pinker, Willard McCarty) and that is certainly welcome, it isn’t necessary. That isn’t why I undertake the exercise, which is fundamentally a rhetorical device for thinking things through in a fairly specific way.
The open litter affords me a particular audience. It’s much easier to address an audience with known interests than to address the General and Undefined Other. While I don’t know Miller’s criticism in any detail, I have read several recent pieces and a couple of interviews where he talks about the profession in general historical terms. I have a sense of the intellectual milieu. That, plus resonance from ancient days at Hopkins, was enough for me. Addressing this letter to Miller was a way for me to think about my work in relation to (what I perceived to be some of) his interests/that milieu.
I open the letter, Paths Not Taken – which I’ve reproduced below, by recalling my structuralist account of “Kubla Khan”, and obseving that the profession had gone one way, while I had gone another. Then I reprise my recent work on Heart of Darkness, a text Miller knows well (and had written about more than once), which was in some way reminiscent of my work on “Kubla Khan” over 40 years ago. From there I move to Apocalypse Now, which, after all, had been based on Heart of Darkness. That’s not the only reason I chose that work. Miller has several times mentioned that he thinks the profession has to address itself to other media, that the literary no longer has the status it had in the mid twentieth century. Thus it made sense for me to write about a film, one with literary resonance. From there I wander back into classic structuralist territory, Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglass, and come out of into computational criticism. I look at Matt Jockers’s Macroanalysis, charts and all (after all, did not Lévi-Strauss use charts?) and manage to close on Edward Said (believe it or not).
But that’s where there document ends, figuratively speaking.
As I noted up top I took many courses with Dick Macksey when I was at Hopkins. For each author we studied he’d hand out a chronology of important events. I conclude this working paper with a brief chronology showing the parallel course of the cognitive sciences and literary theory. The chronology begins in the 1950s – Chomsky, Frye, and Sputnik in 1957 – and ends at the turn of the millennium. Miller’s Presidential address to the MLA runs parallel with a panel discussion, “The Dark Ages of AI”, held at the 1984 meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
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