George Orwell once said of Dickens’ work: “It is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world.” In this book, J. Hillis Miller attempts to identify this “world,” to show how a single view of life pervades every novel that Dickens wrote, and to trace the development of this view throughout the chronological span of Dickens’ career. There are full critical analyses of six of the novels—Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend—and shorter discussions of many of the others. Each novel has been viewed as the transformation of the real world of Dickens’ experience into an imaginary world with certain special qualities of its own.

Certain elements persist through all the novels, the most important of which are the general situation of the hero at the beginning of the story and the general nature of the world in which he lives. Each of Dickens’ heroes begins his life cut off from other people, in a world which seems menacing and unfriendly and, on the social side, composed of inexplicable rituals and mysterious conventions; each lives, like Paul Dombey, “with an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange.” The heroes then move through successive adventures in an attempt to understand the world, to integrate themselves into it, and thus to find their true identity. Initially creatures of poverty and indigence, those characters reach out for something which transcends the material world and the self, something other than human, which will support and maintain the self without engulfing it. Within the totality of Dickens' novels this problem—the search for selfhood—is stated and restated, until, in the later novels, the answer is found to line in a rejections of the past, the given, and the exterior, and a reorientation toward the future and the free human spirit itself as the only true sources of value.

With a real understating and sympathy for his subject, Miller manages to transport us into the midst of Dickens’ “world” and to bring alive for us the whole strange and wonderful tribe that people his novels. This is an enlightening, well-written, enjoyable book for anyone who has ever had an interest in Dickens and his work.

“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller masterfully considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake.

In Fiction and Repetition, one of our leading critics and literary theorists offers detailed interpretations of seven novels: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Well-Beloved, Conrad's Lord Jim, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts. Miller explores the multifarious ways in which repetition generates meaning in these novels—repetition of images, metaphors, motifs; repetition on a larger scale of episodes, characters, plots; and repetition from one novel to another by the same or different authors. While repetition creates meanings, it also, Miller argues, prevents the identification of a single determinable meaning for any of the novels; rather, the patterns made by the various repetitive sequences offer alternative possibilities of meaning which are incompatible. He thus sees “undecidability” as an inherent feature of the novels discussed.

His conclusions make a provocative contribution to current debates about narrative theory and about the principles of literary criticism generally. His book is not a work of theory as such, however, and he avoids the technical terminology dear to many theorists; his book is an attempt to interpret as best he can his chosen texts. Because of his rare critical gifts and his sensitivity to literary values and nuances, his readings send one back to the novels with a new appreciation of their riches and their complexities of form.

Although many books deal individually with each of the major writers treated in Poets of Reality, none attempts through analyses of these particular men and their works, to identify the new directions taken by twentieth-century literature. J. Hillis Miller, challenging the assumption that modern poetry is merely the extension of an earlier romanticism, presents critical studies of the six central figures—Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams—who played key roles in evolving a poetry in which “reality comes to be present to the senses, and present in the words of the poem which ratify this possession.”

A new kind of poetry has appeared in the twentieth century, the author claims, a poetry which, growing out of romanticism and symbolism, goes far beyond it. The old generalizations about the nature and use of poetry are no longer applicable, and it is the gradual emergence of new forms, culminating in the work of Williams, that Miller traces and defines.

The literary school called “deconstruction” has long been dogged by the charge that it is unprincipled, its doors closed to the larger world of moral and social concern. J. Hillis Miller, one of America’s leading teacher-critics, sets the record straight by looking into a series of fictions that allow him to show that ethics has always been at the heart of deconstructive literary criticism. Miller proves his point not by assertion but by doing—deconstruction is here in the hands of a master teacher.

Miller’s controlling image is Ovid’s Pygmalion, who made a statue that came alive and whose descendants (the incestuous Myrrha, the bloodied Adonis) then had to bear the effects of what he did. All storytellers can be seen as Pygmalions, creating characters (personification) who must then act, choose, and evaluate (what Miller calls the “ethics of narration”). If storytellers must be held accountable for what they create, then so must critics or teachers who have their own stories to tell when they write or discuss stories. If the choices are heavy, they are also, Miller wryly points out, happily unpredictable.

The teacher’s first “ethical act” is the choice of what to teach, and Miller chooses his texts boldly. As an active reader, the kind demanded by deconstruction, Miller refashions each story, another ethical act, an intervention that may have social, political, and historical consequences. He then looks beyond text and critical theory to ask whether writing literature, reading it, teaching it, or writing about it makes anything happen in the real world of material history.