On Hillis Miller’s Literary Speech Acts Theory

The speech act theory put forward by the British linguistic philosopher J. L.Austin in1950s was introduced into literature study by Richard Ohmann and StanleyFish and further developed by Paul de Man and Jacque Derrida. Thus the literaryspeech act theory was formed. Hillis Miller is not the first one to apply it to studyliterature, but he made fruitful achievement by improving and perfecting the theorybased on his own understanding.Standing from the tradition, Miller tried to explain the literary speech act from afresh angle. At the beginning he got back to Austin’s illustration and crux, faced theplight directly and put forward that language itself was simultaneously constative andperformative, that fictional language is also performative. In his discussion of thetheory, he proposed a Miller-characterized literary speech act theory by transformingDerrida’s Theory of Différance and de Man’s Theory of Rhetoric carefully. In histheory, Miller re-specified the rules of literary speech act, which assures theeffectiveness of the unworked community and “feasibility” of inappropriate speechacts. Thus the viewpoint that performativity is the essential character of literature wasproposed at last.Miller’s literary speech act theory mainly aims at giving a new definition toelements in literature acts. According to Miller, writing is a process in which thewriter can condcut his performative right, control the text and guide the reader. As tothe text, a virtual reality, it is able to get rid of the writer’s control and is able to self-empowered. The readers are the last part where the meaning of literature can berealized and responsible for reading ethic as well.On the basis of literary speech act theory, Miller made a series of adjustment tohis critical theories of later years. Firstly, he facilitated the ethical turn of his literarycriticism, and secondly he combined literary studies with cultural studies whichprovided a fresh theoretical angle to study literature from the perspective of culturalstudies and assure the status of literature in the process of social constructions. Finallyhe modified his claim of Finality of literature and believed that literature would neverbe terminated by new technology and can exist continuously as long as literarity isfound.