MILLER, J. HILLIS

born March 5, 1928, Newport News, Va., U.S. in full Joseph Hillis Miller American literary critic who was associated with the Geneva group of critics and, later, with deconstruction. Miller graduated from Oberlin College in 1948 and received an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1949 and 1952, respectively. After teaching English at Williams College for one year, he held positions at Johns Hopkins University (195372), Yale University (197286), and the University of California, Irvine (1986 ). Like the Geneva group of critics, Miller argued that literature is a tool for understanding the mind of the writer. His criticism emphasized theological concerns, as in Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965), The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (1968), and The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963). He drew heavily on ideas of the absence or death of the divine. By 1970, however, he had joined the deconstructionist critics at Yale, where he often defended deconstuction against charges of nihilism. Miller's subsequent scholarship was steeped in arcane language and expressed the belief that language itself is a work's sole reality. Miller's criticism in this vein includes Fiction and Repetition (1982) and The Linguistic Moment (1985). In 1987 Miller published The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin.