| In the Age of Globalization, confronted with the rapid development of new telecommunications, we have to take serious consideration of the problems which are pressing and must be dealt with:Is it necessary for us to promote the development of literature and literary criticism? If so, how should we do? J. Hillis Miller's speech act theory in literature may shed some new light on these problems.J. Hillis Miller (1928-) has been the most highly influential American literary critic and theorist. He taught at Johns Hopkins University, and then joined the faculty at Yule University, and currently he is Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine. He did not only serve as President of Modern Language Association, but also was honored by the MLA with a lifetime achievement award in the year of2005. He enjoyed also membership of the American Art and Science Association and that of the American Philosophers Association. And he has been a honorary professor at many universities home and abroad. Besides, he has been granted editorship by many periodicals such as Yale Journal of Criticism, The Oxford Literary Review, and The Georgia Review, etc. Miller has received these honors because of his persistent and fortitude literary researches and the great achievements he has made. His literary researches have roughly fallen into three stages:the stage of the New Criticism and Phenomenology, the stage of Deconstruction, and the stage of the Speech Act in Literature. Miller suggests that speech act in literature can mean:1) A literary work as a whole is a speech act performed by the author, the author's creative writing is a way of doing things with words;2) Promises, declarations, excuses, refusals, testimonies, lies, decisions, and the like said or written by he characters and the narrator in literary works are speech acts performed at critical moments, and the characters and the narrator are doing things with words, which bears the peculiarity of speech acts in a virtual world;3) Readers, the related teaching activities, criticisms or informal commentaries, etc. can be another performative dimension of literary works through reading.Miller's speech act in literature is of great theoretical significant which can be epitomized as follows:1) Miller's speech act in literature has opened up a new horizon in both literature and literary criticism. His theory finds its fountainhead in both Austin's speech act theory and Jacques Derrida's and Paul de Man's related theories, but different from Austin and some other's ideas—speech acts in literature are infelicitous, so literature must be exorcised out of their studies of speech act—Miller holds that literary language, like ordinary language, is a special type of felicitous performative; although Miller and Derrida and de Man have shared most of the ideas of speech act in literature, Miller has made some amendments. It is safe to say that Miller's speech act in literature is the assimilation of the different philosophical ideas both in America and in Europe.2) Miller's speech act in literature approaches literary works from both the internal and external perspective, which enables a holistic and in depth study on the fundamental problems of literary theory. In retrospect, many literary theories and trends in literature and art tended to place too much weight upon only one aspect of the problem instead of considering it in all its aspects. For example, Expressionism and phenomenology laid emphasis on authors, the New Criticism, Formalism, and Structuralism narrowed their focus on texts, and Representationalism as well as the Cultural Studies after the cultural turn in the1980's put stress on the real world. On the contrary to all these, Miller's speech act is a holistic study on literature and all the related elements, which is really estimable in the regime of cultural studies. Miller says that if literary study is orientated to find out the conditions of the history, politics, ethnics, and gender described in a given literary work, and the descriptions as a representation of the reality in the given time and place, such a study is nothing more than a verification of or footnote to a known theory, which does not count for much. Further more, this theory suggests that literature is made by history, without taking the performative force of literature into consideration. Miller's speech act theory can set the wrong right.3) Miller places emphasis upon the felicity of literary performatives and the effects of literary works on the real world, and he says that literature helps to create history in some unknown way, which shows that Miller's speech act in literature is a literary theory with great practicality.4) Miller's speech act in literature offers us an effective way to read and understand literary works. The speech act in literature is closely related to literary criticism, Miller has stated again and again that his theory is not only helpful but also indispensable for a good understanding of literary works.5) According to the speech act theory, literary works are performatives and literary theories and literary criticism are performatives as well. We should make good use of the performative effects of literary theories and literary criticism since performatives themselves are doing things.6) Miller's speech act in literature is both universal and open. Its universality and openness may lead us not only to take reconsideration of Chinese classical literary criticism and the assimilation of the two, but also to apply the speech act in literature to the reading of Chinese literary works.7) In Miller's study on speech act in literature we can find, now and again, dialectical analyses and statements instead of the either-or-the-other conventional set pattern, which will shed light on our research work on literature.As listed above, Miller's speech act in literature is of great importance, but there has been no overall and systematic study on his theory, although there are already some papers and books by some scholars published in the past years in Mainland China. This dissertation is an attempt to give a holistic and systematic introduction to and analysis of Miller's theory on speech act in literature. The dissertation is composed of seven parts:Introduction, Chapters One to Five, and Conclusion. Introduction is devoted to brief Miller's speech act in literature, his teaching and research work experiences, a literature review home and abroad, the importance and value of the present dissertation topic, and the research method used and the difficulties anticipated in the research. It is an attempt to discover the relationship between Miller's speech act in literature and other literary theories such as the New Criticism, Phenomenology, Deconstructionism, and the advancement made by Miller in his theory, through which we have found that analytic reading and a firm focus on the use of language are the key notes through his research work; the outstanding difference between speech act in literature and Phenomenology lies in the different ideas on the author's consciousness, with the former's abandonment of the author's consciousness; Miller's speech act in literature and Deconstructionism share more similarities than differences—they both are for the deconstructionist ideas, but with different focuses, the former has turned its focus onto the effects of the performative speech acts and how these acts can take effect.Chapert One of the dissertation developes the idea that literature is felicitous performative. Miller says that, since the performance studies by scholars represented by Judith Butler are so popular that they are widely influential, it is necessary to for us to distinguish the performative in speech act in literature from that in performance at the setout of our discussion on performative acts. In order to do this, Miller has written a paper introducing these two kinds of performative acts and briefed the similarities and differences between them. He states that the important differences between them lie in the different ideas on self and social construction, and how make judgment on speech acts in literature, ect.; while the similarities between them are those of family resemblance. J. Austin, the founder of speech act theory, holds that literature is infelicitous performative, and should be kept away from the studies on speech acts. With the help of Derrida's and de Man's related ideas, Miller criticized Austin's idea from different perspectives. He has deconstructed Austin's self and intention of the internal situations and the contexts of external circumstances as Austin has suggested in the six rules prescribing the felicity of performatives. Miller has deconstructed Austin's conscious self from three perspectives, namely they are, the one who takes the performative acts are indefinite, even if he has died, his speech acts remain effective, and unconsciousness exerts influence on performative acts. Miller listed five reasons to prove that there are not any definitely saturated contexts. Since Austin's six rules are untenable, Miller suggests that whether a performative act is felicitous should be judged by if it is effective or not. In his works Miller has given adequate explanations on performatives in literature, and the effects of literature as performative. So it is safe to say that his conclusion—literature is felicitous performative—is tenable.Miller's theory of speech act in literature is inseparable from his literary criticism. He has emphasized repeatedly that this theory is not only helpful for us to understand literary works, but also the necessary way to understand them. In Chapter Two, what are under a very close examination include how Miller has applied his theory of speech act in literature to the reading of literary works, how his literary criticism has enriched his theory, and the mutual interaction between them. So far as the application of the theory of speech act in literature is concerned, Miller's literary criticism is of pioneering importance, for he has fixed his focus not only on explicit felicitous performatives, but also on implicit ones, while what Austin has focused on is explicit felicitous performatives only. This chapter introduces and analyses briefly how Miller understands lies, sign acts, passion performatives, and the nonnotional words such as "oh". Lies are against the principle of sincerity, so they are excluded by Austin from his research. In fact, there are a lot of lies both in ordinary language and in literary works, and even literary works themselves can be regarded as lies. Through his studies on lies in literary works, Miller has found that lies have the performative effects which make the liars do what they have promised even if it is against their wills, in addition to this, lies can make people believe them, on the basis of which believe the performative effects made by the lies. Unlike Austin who takes sign acts as the supplements for speech acts, Miller thinks that sign acts can replace speech acts to make effects. He has paid close attention to not only sign acts represented by "kiss", but also facial expressions and allegorical signs, discovering actually that it helps have better understanding of a literary work to analyses sign acts in it, and the cultrural elements loaded in the signs. Miller has put foreword the notion of "passion performatives", because of his discovery that both speech acts and sign acts are closely related to people's emotions. He has also discussed the problem:Does the external expression show the existed internal feelings or the external expression of feelings create external feelings performatively. Besides, he has studied the exchangeability of feelings, how literary works cause the readers' feelings, and the expressions of passion performatives.Miller thinks that prosopopoeia and apostrophe are the use of words in order to make something happen, both of them are thorough performatives, because of which he gives them great attention when he is reading. We can come to the conclusion from Miller's explanations that the skillful application of prosopopoeia and apostrophe could make performative acts more effective performatively. Those are the key points in Chapter Three. On the basis of the traditional definition, Miller has defined "prosopopoeia" as the naming of a person, thing, or object which can be not existed, not present, unanimated or dead, endowing them a face, voice or soul, and "apostrophe" as the speaker's turning directly and his call to some person or thing. With the help of many examples, Miller has given his detailed explanations of "prosopopoeia" and "apostrophe", outlined the important performative effects of them, ie, without them, there will be no narrative, they are the necessary conditions for the understanding of ethics, especially for the ethics of reading, they are the bridge linking the present to the past and to the future, they form a unity of man and nature, they help readers to enter the virtual world, and they help improve the artistry of literary works, etc.Miller has placed stress on community when reading, which can be seen from The Conflagration of Community:Fiction Before and After Auschwitz, and "Unworked and Unavowable:Community in The Awkward Age" in Literature as Conduct. Chapter Four of this dissertation is a brief introduction to Miller's ideas on the relationship between speech act in literature and community. Miller has stated the relationship between them by discussing what is community, if a readers group is a community, the relationship between literary performatives and communities, and the relationship between performatives and communities in literary works. Miller says that traditional community is usually characterized by its commonness, directness, friendliness, regionalism, and immortality. Nowadays there are not any communities of this kind but unavowable communities which have the following characteristics: alternity, uncommunicativeness, mortality, exposition. Miller quite approves of both Nancy's and Derrida's ideas on unavowable communities, and creatively integrates them with his research on speech act in literature. Since literature is felicitous performative, we can make use of the performative effects of the performative acts in literature to establish a type of community that is beneficial to the over-all development of people.Miller says that literary works as speech act in literature and literary studies are closely related to their relevant ages, and so is speech act theory. Chapter Five introduces, with a careful analysis, Miller's ideas on literature and literary studies in the regime of print and in the regime of telecommunications, the relationship between speech act in literature, ideology and mass media, literarily in telecommunicaon media and telecommunication media in literature, and the speech act theories in the regime of print media and telecommunication media. Miller holds that print media have spurred the development of literature and literary studies, while telecommunication media or the regime of telecommunications has exerted great negative influence on the development. This being the case, according to Miller, it is still necessary for us to do research work on literature. Miller thinks that we should take the opportunities in the regime of telecommunications to develop literature and literary studies. For instance, researchers should keep themselves in an open mental state and pay close attention to the new forms of literary works, through the interaction between authors and readers on the internet, set the standards for net literature to guarantee the quality of the literary works, and broaden the scope of literary studies with the help of Derrida's ideas. So far as the relationship between speech act in literature and ideology, and mass media is concerned, Miller's ideas are mainly:1) Speech act in literature is both a reinforcement of the dominant ideology and a criticism on it,2) Speech act in literature can create ideology performatively and make it have performative effects,3) The influences exerted by the new telecommunications media are greater than those by the print media,4) Ideological establishments are not only helpful to reinforce ideology, but also helpful to make speech acts more felicitous,5) New forms of literary works are a mixture with literarity which has the following two characteristics:creating the fictional world and making performatives,6) Mass media have felicity, which can be proved by the descriptions found in literary works. Miller holds that Austin's speech act theory belongs to the regime of print media because Austin's self is originated from Cartesian notions of selfhood which is closely related to the regime of the print media, but Derrida's speech act theory belongs to the regime of telecommunications, for this type of media has got rid of dichotomy and brought about many uncertainties which is clearly stated in Derrida's theory.The ending part of the dissertation is an attempted application of Miller's speech act in literature to the reading and analyses of The Top Ten Thousand by Liu Zhengyun, through which we can make a comparison between Miller's speech act in literature and classical Chinese literary criticism make a reflection on Miller's theory through which we have found that his theory is somewhat limited:1) His speech act theory has placed emphases on speech act only, leaving the structure, style, and phonological elements undisguised;2) He has put too much weight on the idea that language makes effect automatically, on the base of the principle that everything in the universe is related to each other in one way or another, in order to be effective language must be related to the consciousness of the participants, to certain cultures, and to some social regulations and conventions, etc. These elements, together with the performative effects, should be put in our consideration;3) According to Miller, performative acts in literature form the core of literary works, but there is a great variety of performative acts in literary works, and among them some may be more important than the rest. Miller has failed to notice this;4) Although Miller has put forward the category of passion performative, in his reading practice and literary research he has not paid enough attention to the discussion on emotions;5) Miller has stressed that authors are supposed to be responsible for their literary works and the effects that be made upon the readers, but as a result these effects of performative acts are uncertain. If so, how could it be possible for the authors to be responsible for their works?6) Miller has taken literary theory and criticism as performatives, but has not given any detailed discussion on how to make use of the effects performed by them.All in all, we should make full use of Miller's speech act in literature, spare no efforts to make his theory well-established, in order to enjoy literary work, make use of the performative effects of literary studies, guarantee the high quality of literary creations, and promote the advancement of literary studies.
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