An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China by J. Hillis Miller (review)

An Innocent Abroad collects fifteen lectures that J. Hillis Miller presented at various universities in the People’s Republic of China over a period of more than twenty years, beginning in 1988. It is, among other things, a concentrated and nuanced meditation on the status and future of printed books in our time of globalization. Although Miller covers a wide range of topics, the heart of the book is, as Fredric Jameson writes in his brief introduction, “the new and urgent, contemporary problem: not what literature is, but whether it can survive in any recognizable form in globalization . . .” (xxii). The fundamental questions Miller addresses and returns to in various ways are: (1) What purpose might literature serve, if any, in the globalized world? (2) Does literature still matter? (3) Should we continue to read and teach it, given the new reality?

The fact that this last question is even posed at all is telling. From the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century, the study of literature did not, in general, need to be defended or justified as relevant. Knowledge and skill in literature was accepted as essential to the pursuit of veritas. Moreover, it was believed and taught by many that literature embodies the ethos of a people/culture; and thus, to be an enlightened citizen one should be well-versed in the literary traditions and defining works of a culture. The debate, to the extent that there was one, was often over what and how to read, but not whether the effort was ultimately futile. Times are certainly different now and the prognosis for literature’s future appears rather bleak. Despite certain hedging qualifications, Miller concludes that “literary study’s time is up” (69) and now we are “in the long-drawn-out twilight of the epoch of print literature” (261).

The reasons for this “twilight” are complex and deeply connected with global capitalism, which Miller critiques in multiple ways. However, Miller focuses much of his commentary on the dramatic socio-cultural changes reflected in, and brought about by, the explosion of new technologies and telecommunications (engines and symptoms of late-capitalism). The seeming decline in literary study as we have known it (i.e., close textual analysis rooted in theoretical/discursive/linguistic traditions inextricably bound with print culture and the emergence, hegemony, and conflicts of nation states) is, for Miller, directly linked to changes in technology. Not simply distracting—though certainly this as well—new technologies often nullify or supersede a central component of literature’s allure and authority: namely, its capacity to “expand our lives by giving us access to . . . incommensurate virtual universes” (90). We humans, Miller argues, have a propensity and need to envision and experience “virtual worlds” that reflect and alter our phenomenal, lived worlds/experiences. Furthermore, we are apparently fascinated by differences and strangeness, especially in regard to others. Before our current age of technology, it was primarily literature that provided “an indispensable means of access to a confrontation with . . . the strangeness or irreducible otherness of others . . . (55). Uniquely other, sui generis, offering “virtual universes,” the literary work emerges and exists, phenomenally, in and through our reading, which, like a voyage of discovery, is not to be replicated or experienced in the same way by anyone else. We see, feel, and think differently with each literary experience. Through literature we are provided access to “the universe through the eyes of another”—which is mediated not only through a work’s content but also, importantly, through its form.

And yet, despite its promises and attractions, literature has been more or less eclipsed as a force within general culture and society. These days, Miller tells us, “radio, television, cinema, popular music, and the Internet . . . are more decisive in legislating citizens’ ethos and values . . .” (88). Although literature may very well provide us with “an unparalleled ability to feel what it might have been like to live in Chaucer’s time, in Shakespeare’s time, or in Emily Dickinson’s time . . .” (55), it cannot, in...