Synopses & Reviews
This innovative work sets two texts by two different authors on facing pages, designed so that they read in tandem—Millers text on the right, Asensis on the left. It makes a long trajectory, moving back and forth as an ox plows a field, boustrophedonically, to borrow the figure in Manuel Asensis title.
Black Holes, by J. Hillis Miller, analyzes changes in the contemporary research university in the West. The mission of the research university has been profoundly influenced by the end of the Cold War and by globalization, advances in communication technologies, and shifts in funding from the federal government to transnational corporations. Miller aims to discover what the function of the humanities might be in this new kind of university. Echoing Bill Readings, he calls for a university of dissensus that would be made up of adjacent or overlapping communities, each fundamentally other to the others, each inhabited by its own otherness. Each of those opacities is a kind of black hole in the luminosity or enlightenment to which the university has traditionally been dedicated. Miller concludes with sections on Trollope and Proust that attempt to show how otherness is exemplified in the work of two fundamentally dissimilar authors.
Manuel Asensis J. Hillis Miller: or, Boustrophedonic Reading is the first comprehensive interpretation of Millers work, one that foregrounds its difference not only from the work of his associates—such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Georges Poulet—but from European literary methodologies such as semiotics, Slavic formalism, Glosematics, narratology, structuralism, and reception theory. Bypassing or challenging conventional accounts of Millers work, Asensi brings a fresh view to his readings of Millers criticism. He finds there a complex and partially contradictory “matrix” that persists, throughout the apparent methodological changes, from Millers earliest work to the most recent. According to Asensi, that matrix organizes itself around a fascination with the strangeness or otherness of literary works.
Synopsis
This innovative work sets two separate texts by two different authors (Black Holes by J. Hillis Miller and J. Hillis Miller, or Boustrophedonic Reading by Manuel Asensi) on facing pages.
Synopsis
This innovative work sets two separate and independently written texts by two different authors (Black Holes by J. Hillis Miller and J. Hillis Miller, or Boustrophedonic Reading by Manuel Asensi) on facing pages. 'Boustrophedonic reading' refers to the way in which the text turns from left to right and from right to left.
Synopsis
This innovative work sets two texts by two different authors on facing pages, designed so that they read in tandemMiller's text on the right, Asensi's on the left. Miller analyzes the changes in the contemporary research university in the West; Asensi provides the first comprehensive interpretation of Miller's work.
About the Author
J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author, most recently, of Topographies (Stanford, 1994). Manuel Asensi is Professor of Literary History and Theory at the University of Valencia.