Review of Reading for Our Time: \u27Adam Bede\u27 and \u27Middlemarch\u27 Revisited

As his sub-title indicates, J. Hillis Miller is returning in his latest book to the study of George Eliot, bringing to bear on Adam Bede and Middlemarch the insight and erudition acquired in a long and distinguished career as a scholar and critic. He pursues a similar line to his wellknown articles from the 1970s on \u27Narrative and History\u27 and \u27Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch\u27, subjecting that novel to a close and tenacious deconstructive reading that brings out the sophisticated self-qualifying nature of George Eliot\u27s fiction. This is preceded by a shorter discussion of Adam Bede which shows how its celebrated commitment to realism and a mimetic theory of fictional language is accompanied by a contrasting insight into the way that language creates its own meanings, so that the novel is seen to turn back on itself and question its own assumptions. Hillis Miller\u27s close reading of both novels deliberately eschews the technical rhetorical terms of narratology on the attractive principle that \u27it may be best to keep inside a given work, to try as much as possible to follow its own lines of self-interpretation or of selfcontradiction\u27 (p. 2); and with Adam Bede he is subtle and carefully incisive in his tracing of recurrent patterns of imagery that relate the human to the natural, and in his illuminating juxtaposition of four widely spaced but clearly related passages about falling in love - an experience that is related to the appreciation of natural beauty and the beauty of art and music, all of which create an oceanic sense of transcendence. The passages are examined in Miller\u27s characteristically deconstructive fashion: just as Adam\u27s falling in love with Hetty is based on a misunderstanding of her feelings for him, all these experiences reveal the fictional nature of the emotions involved. These moments of transcendence are all fictions, all human constructions and projections onto objects and events of values they do not themselves possess; and, extrapolating from that, all the faithful mirroring undertaken in the novel is equally ungrounded and fictitious. If the conclusion here may seem too comprehensively dismissive - falling in love, after all, has an emotional reality that is independent of whether the love is reciprocated - Miller\u27s deconstruction reveals the ubiquity of fiction only to insist at the same time on its necessity, following the Nietzschean principle that we have art lest we perish from the truth - the truth that is represented in this novel by the dark pool which confronts the desperate Hetty and stands for all that exceeds human comprehension. Human imagination may be prone to destructive excess, like Hetty\u27s fatally silly fantasizing, but it is also benignly constructive, creating the basis of culture in the shared illusions that hold a community like Hayslope together

Thinking Literature across Continents

'Thinking Literature across Continents' finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate generative dialogue on poetry, world literature, pedagogy, and the ethics of literature. Addressing a varied literary context ranging from Victorian literature, Chinese literary criticism and philosophy, and continental philosophy to Sanskrit poetics and modern European literature, Ghosh offers a transnational theory of literature while Miller emphasizes the need to account for what a text says and how it says it. This book highlights two minds continually discovering new paths of communication and two literary and cultural traditions intersecting in productive and compelling ways

Twilight of the Anthropocene idols

Following on from Theory and the Disappearing Future, Cohen, Colebrook and Miller turn their attention to the eco-critical and environmental humanities’ newest and most fashionable of concepts, the Anthropocene. The question that has escaped focus, as “tipping points” are acknowledged as passed, is how language, mnemo-technologies, and the epistemology of tropes appear to guide the accelerating ecocide, and how that implies a mutation within reading itself—from the era of extinction events.Only in this moment of seeming finality, the authors argue, does there arise an opportunity to be done with mourning and begin reading. Drawing freely on Paul de Man’s theory of reading, anthropomorphism and the sublime, Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols argues for a mode of critical activism liberated from all-too-human joys and anxieties regarding the future. It was quite a few decades ago (1983) that Jurgen Habermas declared that ‘master thinkers had fallen on hard times.’ His pronouncement of hard times was premature. For master thinkers it is the best of times. Not only is the world, supposedly, falling into a complete absence of care, thought and frugality, a few hyper-masters have emerged to tell us that these hard times should be the best of times. It is precisely because we face the end that we should embrace our power to geo-engineer, stage the revolution, return to profound thinking, reinvent the subject, and recognize ourselves fully as one global humanity. Enter anthropos

Hypertekstens etik

Hypertekstens eti

Lektüren interventionen: Literatur und die zeichen der zeit ausgewählte studien

Der vorliegende Band ist eine neue thematisch orientierte Zusammenstellung von Hillis Millers jüngeren Arbeiten, die alle um die eine Frage kreisen: warum und wozu Literaturwissenschaft, oder im erweiterten Sinne ‚Kulturwissenschaft‘ - im Zeitalter der elektronischen Medien und der vorwiegend nachgefragten technologischen Berufe der heutigen Zeit weder in der Geschäftswelt noch in der persönlichen Entwicklung? Diese Frage ist nicht ganz neu, hat viele Facetten und erfordert differenzierte Antworten, die vom politischen und kulturellen Klima einer Gesellschaft abhängen

Direct visualisation of collateral ventilation in COPD with hyperpolarised gas MRI

Abstract Background Collateral ventilation has been proposed as a mechanism of compensation of respiratory function in obstructive lung diseases but observations of it in vivo are limited. The assessment of collateral ventilation with an imaging technique might help to gain insight into lung physiology and assist the planning of new bronchoscopic techniques for treating emphysema. Objective To obtain images of delayed ventilation that might be related to collateral ventilation over the period of a single breath-hold in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Methods Time-resolved breath-hold hyperpolarised 3He MRI was used to obtain images of the progressive influx of polarised gas into initially non-ventilated defects. Results A time-series of images showed that 3He moves into lung regions which were initially non-ventilated. Ventilation defects with delayed filling were observed in 8 of the 10 patients scanned. Conclusions A method for direct imaging of delayed ventilation within a single breath-hold has been demonstrated in patients with COPD. Images of what is believed to be collateral ventilation and slow filling of peripheral airspaces due to increased flow resistance are presented. The technique provides 3D whole-lung coverage with sensitivity to regional information, and is non-invasive and non-ionising

Prophylactic Intra-Aortic Balloon Counterpulsation in High Risk Cardiac Surgery: The PINBALL Pilot Multicentre, Registry-Linked, Randomised, Controlled Feasibility Trial

Background: Prophylactic intra-aortic balloon counterpulsation (IABC) is commonly used in selected patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, but definitive evidence is lacking. The aim of the multicentre PINBALL Pilot randomised controlled trial (RCT) was to assess the feasibility of performing a definitive trial to address this question. Methods: Patients listed for CABG surgery with impaired left ventricular function and at least one additional risk factor for postoperative low cardiac output syndrome were eligible for inclusion if the treating surgical team was uncertain as to the benefit of prophylactic IABC. The primary outcome of feasibility was based on exceeding a pre-specified recruitment rate, protocol compliance and follow-up. Results: The recruitment rate of 0.5 participants per site per month did not meet the feasibility threshold of two participants per site per month and the study was stopped early after enrolment of 24 out of the planned sample size of 40 participants. For 20/24 (83%) participants, preoperative IABC use occurred according to study assignment. Six (6)-month follow-up was available for all enrolled participants, [IABC 1 death (8%) vs. control 1 death (9%), p = 0.95]. Conclusion: The PINBALL Pilot recruitment rate was insufficient to demonstrate feasibility of a multicentre RCT of prophylactic IABC in high risk patients undergoing CABG surgery