The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz

“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.Miller juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Kertész’s Fatelessness—with Kafka’s novels and Morrison’s Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, Miller questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The Conflagration of Community is an eloquent study of literature’s value to fathoming the unfathomable.

The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz

Literature & Fiction

MILLER, J. Hillis

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

“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. Miller juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Kertész’s Fatelessness—with Kafka’s novels and Morrison’s Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, Miller questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The Conflagration of Community is an eloquent study of literature’s value to fathoming the unfathomable.

The University of Chicago Press

Examines texts in which novelists read themselves, discusses the influence of reading on the reader, and explores the relationship between literature and society

The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (Wellek Library Lectures)

Columbia Univ. Pr.

Examines texts in which novelists read themselves, discusses the influence of reading on the reader, and explores the relationship between literature and society

A landmark work of literary criticism by one of the foremost interpreters of nineteenth-century England, The Disappearance of God confronts the consciousness of an absent (though perhaps still existent) God in the writings of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. J. Hillis Miller surveys the intellectual and material developments that conspired to cut man off from God--among other factors the city, developments within Christianity, subjectivism, and the emergence of the modern historical sense--and shows how each writer's body of work reflects a sustained response to the experience of God's disappearance.

The Disappearance of God: FIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITERS

University of Illinois Press

Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines

Yale University Press

"What line should the critic follow in explicating, unfolding, or unknotting . . . passages? How should the critic thread her or his way into the labyrinthine problems of narrative form?―from chapter I In this brilliant and engaging book, one of America's leading literary critics explores the intricacies of narrative theory. Using the image of Ariadne's thread, which was given to Theseus to carry into the labyrinth so that he could find his way out, J. Hillis Miller traces out the "line" so often associated with narrative and writing in general. In the process he illuminates the nature of literature as well as the nature of narrative. Considering a wide range of texts from Western literature over the last two centuries―in particular Meredith's The Egoist, Goethe's Elective Affinities, and Borges's "Death and the Compass"―Miller explores the way rhetorical devices and figurative language interrupt, break into, delay, and expand storytelling. He also illustrates these rhetorical disruptions of narrative logic in his own work. In its four chapters―about the role of line, character, interpersonal relationships, and figurative language in narrative―Miller's study encounters in its own language the problems it discusses, as concepts and words are scrutinized for their diverse meanings and resonances. Demonstrating that every narrative, including this one about the nature of narrative, has divergent lines and multiple motives and uses, Ariadne's Thread tells its story and enacts its subject at the same time.

Debates rage over what kind of literature we should read, what is good and bad literature, and whether in the global, digital age, literature even has a future. But what exactly is literature? Why should we read literature? How do we read literature? These are some of the important questions J. Hillis Miller answers in this beautifully written and passionate book. He begins by asking what literature is, arguing that the answer lies in literature's ability to create an imaginary world simply with words. On Literature also asks the crucial question of why literature has such authority over us. Returning to Plato, Aristotle and the Bible, Miller argues we should continue to read literature because it is part of our basic human need to create imaginary worlds and to have stories. Above all, On Literature is a plea that we continue to read and care about literature.

On Literature (Thinking in Action)

Routledge

The author shows, through a close reading of Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil", how a text can offer unsolicited answers and reveal its linguistic ruses to close scrutiny and how such a reading can bear on contemporary debates about canon formation, the university curriculum and the place of literary studies in the late 20th century. The book includes an interview with the author, an increasingly prominent figure in American critical theory.

Hawthorne & History: Defacing It (Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory)

Blackwell Pub.

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.

Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels

British & Irish

Harvard University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MILLER, J. Hillis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by MILLER, J. Hillis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MILLER, J. Hillis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz

The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz

The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (Wellek Library Lectures)

The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (Wellek Library Lectures)

The Disappearance of God: FIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITERS

Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines

Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines

On Literature (Thinking in Action)

Hawthorne & History: Defacing It (Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory)

Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels