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Reviewed by:
  • Reading for Our Time: "Adam Bede" and "Middlemarch" Revisited by J. Hillis Miller, and: The Conflagration of Community: Literature Before and After Auschwitz by J. Hillis Miller, and: The Medium Is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies by J. Hillis Miller
  • Éamonn Dunne (bio)
Reading for Our Time: "Adam Bede" and "Middlemarch" Revisited. By J. Hillis Miller. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 209 pp. Paper $35.00.
The Conflagration of Community: Literature Before and After Auschwitz. By J. Hillis Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 357 pp. Paper $26.15.
The Medium Is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies. By J. Hillis Miller. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2009. 106 pp. Paper $27.50.

J. Hillis Miller is now a staggering sixty years in the profession. "The single most significant North American literary critic of the twentieth century," according to Edinburgh University Press, and the author of just under thirty books and well over a hundred essays, he is becoming, astonishingly, even more prolific nowadays. In recent years he has published For Derrida (2009), The Medium Is the Maker (2009), The Conflagration of Community (2011) and Reading for Our Time (2012) and is currently working on another book on community as well as publishing a series of influential essays on critical climate change.

The latest of his books, Reading for Our Time, consists of a series of reedited, revised and revamped essays from the mid-1970s to 2006; as such the book is a palimpsest of densely stratified situated acts of reading reflecting Miller's abiding interests in Victorian literary realism, continental philosophy, and rhetorical reading. There are only four chapters: "Realism Affirmed and Dismantled in Adam Bede," "Reading Middlemarch Right for Today," "Chapter Seventeen of Adam Bede: Truth-Telling Narration," and "Returning to Middlemarch: Interpretation as Naming and (Mis)Reading," respectively.

The opening chapter examines Adam Bede as a paradigmatic realist novel before engaging in close rhetorical readings which argue that "it would not [End Page 342] be extravagant to say that the narrator of Adam Bede performs a rigorous act of deconstructive reading avant la lettre" (25). Chapter 2 argues that the "totalizing" power of Middlemarch, its apparent organic unity—an encompassing ideological reinforcement of logocentrism—is simultaneously undermined by a "parabolic method" that replaces "objectivism with a fully developed perspectivism" (63). Chapter 3, in which Miller's story "pauses a little," returns us to the famous Chapter 17 of Adam Bede to explain why "realism is catachresis, and can be named only in catachresis" (81). Finally, Chapter 4, the highlight, and by far the longest chapter in the book, resonates and concludes with Paul de Man's pungent sentence: "The (im)possibility of reading should not be taken too lightly" (165). Here Miller's fantastic scopophilic neologism "semioptic" (combining semiotic and optic) points to the way seeing is always interested, always interpretive, motivated and creative (96). It may be, he says, seeing the issue presented in Eliot, "that rhetoric is not so much a progressive mastery of language both for reading and for writing as it is the place where the impossibility of mastery is decisively encountered" (127).

Readers will find abundant repetition in this book, partly a result of the patchwork nature of the volume, though also as a result of the focus on repetition in the work's progenitor volume Fiction and Repetition (1982). Phrases and quotations from Eliot rebound and replicate amid disarmingly probative readings eloquently alerting readers to minutiae all too easily glossed over in those novels. The strange thing about those readings is how critically, intelligently, and insightfully fresh they are now. What is most peculiar, to this reviewer at least, is the Eliot I find in those pages is not an Eliot I have ever known. The Eliot in those pages, like Miller's Kafka in The Conflagration of Community, is strangely anachronistic and every bit as devastatingly perceptive as Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida or de Man.

Adam Bede and, to a greater extent, Middlemarch are exemplary in illustrating our human tendency to project fictions and to live our lives through those fictions by taking figures of speech literally; for faces...

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