The Ethics Of Reading: The Inquiry Of J. Hillis Miller's Critical Theory

In this dissertation, the concept of reading is considered as a starting point from which to look into J. Hillis Miller's critical theory, and the idea "from the impossibility of reading to the ethics of reading" as a clue to understand his critical theory characterized by heterogeneous features. To Miller, reading is, and writing does, an act which is related to the ethics and responsibility. It can make some new things happen too. To him, a literary text can not be read in two incompatible ways, so it is undecidable. Miller reasons the unreadablility of text in a theoretical sense, which is the impossibility of reading. Miller turned to studies of ethics. Discussing of the parable of Joseph.K in Kafka's The Castle, Miller points out that it is impossible to get all the meanings of a text epistemologically. He compares reading's ethical dimension to its epistemological dimension, and reaches a conclusion that the ethics of reading means reading is to do something. With the help of Derrida and De Man, Miller used and transformed the idea of "performative", and connected it to ethics. In his Speech Acts in Literature he focuses on the role of literary study in the investigation of ethical and political commitment, the role of speech acts in literature. All Miller's work on speech act theory can be regarded as a footnote to his ethical turn. Comparing his work on speech act theory, his turn to ethics is more originating. Along with his idea transforming from the impossibility of reading to the ethics of reading, the keywords of his critical theory should change from deconstruction to a rhetorical reading. Miller holds that his ethical criticism is to incorporate the rhetorical study of literature into the study of the historical, social, and ideological dimension of literature. That means he has never moved his focus away from rhetorical reading.