J. Hillis Miller
| J. Hillis Miller | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Joseph Hillis Miller March 5, 1928 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Occupation | Literary critic |
| Spouse(s) | Married |
| Children | 3 children |
| Relatives | J. Hillis Miller, Sr. (father) |
Joseph Hillis Miller, Jr. (born March 5, 1928) is an American literary critic who has been heavily influenced by—and who has heavily influenced—deconstruction.
Hillis Miller was born in Newport News, Virginia. He is the son of J. Hillis Miller, Sr., a Baptist minister, university professor and administrator who served as the president of the University of Florida. Miller graduated from Oberlin College (B.A. summa cum laude, 1948) and Harvard University (M.A. 1949, Ph.D. 1952). Miller is married and has three children.
Miller has been an important humanities and literature scholar specializing in Victorian and Modernist literature, with a keen interest in the ethics of reading and reading as a cultural act. From 1952 to 1972, Miller taught at Johns Hopkins University. During this time, Miller was heavily influenced by fellow Johns Hopkins professor and Belgian literary critic Georges Poulet and the Geneva School of literary criticism, which Miller characterized as "the consciousness of the consciousness of another, the transposition of the mental universe of an author into the interior space of the critic's mind."
In 1972, he joined the faculty at Yale University where he taught for fourteen years. At Yale, he worked alongside prominent literary critics Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, where they were collectively known as the Yale School of deconstruction, in contention with prominent Yale influence theorist Harold Bloom. As a prominent American deconstructionist, Miller defines the movement as searching for "the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all," and cites that there are multiple layers to any text, both its clear surface and its deep countervailing subtext:
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