Reading for Our Time

J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor, University of California at Irvine. He has published many books and essays on 19th and 20th-century literature and on literary theory. His most recent books are For Derrida and The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida, and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies. Miller is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Foreword: Required Reading or 'some of us, at least', Julian Wolfreys; Prelude; Acknowledgements; 1. Realism Affirmed and Dismantled in Adam Bede; Adam Bede and Romanticism; Adam Bede as Paradigmatic Realist Novel; Challenges to the Paradigm of Realism in Adam Bede; Four Passages Challenging Mimetic Realism; What Do These Passages Really Say?; The Irony of Mistaken Interpretation in Adam Bede; Hetty Sorrel as Sophist Figure; Adam Bede as a Story about the Reading of Signs and as a Text to be Read; Repetition in Adam Bede; The Community Restored; 2. Reading Middlemarch Right for Today; Totalization Affirmed and Undermined in Middlemarch; Versions of Totalization; Middlemarch as Pseudo-History; Demystification of the Connection of Narrative and History; Totalizing Metaphors in Middlemarch; Middlemarch as Fractal Pattern; Middlemarch as Web; Middlemarch as Stream; Minutiae in Middlemarch; Triumph of Metaphorical Totalization; The Optical Metaphor; Creative Seeing as the Will to Power; The Parable of the Pier-Glass; Human Beings as False Interpreters; 3. Chapter Seventeen of Adam Bede: Truth-Telling Narration; Down with the Art of the Unreal!; The Language of Realism; Performative Undecidability; 4. Returning to Middlemarch: Interpretation as Naming and (Mis)Reading; Interpretation as the Creation of Totalizing Emblems; Money as Metaphor; The Boomerang Effect of the Monetary Metaphor; Money as Universal Measure; The Uses of Art; Conclusions About Metaphor; O Aristotle!; The Roar on the Other Side of Silence; The Ruin of Totalization in a Cascade of Misreadings: A Summary Description of the Ground Gained So Far; Form as Repetition in Unlikeness; A Finale in Which Nothing is Final; Dorothea's Limitless "Yes"; Dorothea as Ariadne; George Eliot's Life and Work as an Uneven Tissue of Ungrounded Repetitions; Coda; Notes; Index