Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller by Éamonn Dunne (review)

Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller is a unique book. The author has grasped the essentials of J. Hillis Miller’s theoretical doctrine, critical thinking, and reading strategy. As Miller says in his preface, “Éamonn Dunne has understood my writings extremely well, almost too well for comfort. This wonderfully witty, subtle, and perceptive little book is the best introduction I know to my work” (3). I do not think that Miller is merely flattering Dunne, although Miller has always been kind to scholars of the younger generation. As Miller sums up, the book has four features: the acute, the arbitrary, comparison and contrast, and diversion (3–9). I quite agree with him, although I will add something more in this review. Also, as Miller points out, the book is “full of such ironic plays on words”: for example, the innocent word glossary turns into the more threatening “critico-glossolalia” (4). Dunne’s research areas include speech act theory, narratology, contemporary Continental philosophy, and twentieth-century movements in literary theory and criticism, which follows closely what Miller has been doing since he started his academic career decades ago. Miller has so far published some thirty books and hundreds of articles or essays, with many of them translated into quite a few languages. Readers badly need such a book to guide them to have a good reading and correct understanding of Miller’s works. In this sense, Reading Theory Now has been published at just the right moment.

I have always found reading Miller’s works to be a great pleasure, not only because he often gives insightful ideas for you to understand canonical literary works and contemporary cultural phenomena as well as the most cutting-edge theoretical trends, but also because he writes in a very eloquent and fluent style. Dunne also writes his book in a Millerian style. As the book description tells us, it “enables its readers to see how and why theoretical models of reading are of use only in the practical event of reading literary and philosophical texts, that the politics and poetics of interpretive paradigms are constantly shifting, changing and evolving as present day perspectives transform those traditions unalterably.” Indeed, Miller’s works cover a wide range of disciplines and many branches of learning, which finds particular embodiment in his thirty or so books dealing with almost all the important Western writers or theorists: from such canonical writers as Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, George Elliot, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and Wallace Stevens to some contemporary postmodern and postcolonial writers; from such eminent Continental philosophers as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Geoffrey Bennington, J. L. Austin, and Derek Attridge to his American colleagues such as M. H. Abrams and Paul de Man. As a former student of physics, Miller pays particularly keen attention to advanced technological innovations and even deals with their impact on literature and critical theory in his writings. That is why he always writes in a border-crossing and interdisciplinary way.

As a Chinese scholar and reader, I have had personal interactions with Miller since I became acquainted with him in the beginning of the 1990s. Whenever I get hold of a book by him, I always feel great joy in reading it. But Miller’s books are too many for me to collect or read. Sometimes, I also advise my students to read his books if they want to enhance their reading ability. But even so, I am perhaps one of the very few Chinese readers who have read most of his books and articles and am definitely most indebted to him personally, as well as to his writings. I have even supervised a Ph.D. student of mine who told me that she would write...