and have a strong narrative.
We appreciate when an essay
moves beyond the personal to
tell us something new about
the world.
From the Editors
Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Viet Nam. At the time we are going to press, nearly 320,000 have died from the COVID-19 pandemic. Personal responsibility just doesn’t work. Our hospitals are crowded, our nurses and doctors placed in harm’s way, while too many people refuse to wear masks across the state. Why?
Our mythologies, the narratives our country tells about itself, are governed by a central contradiction of the American psyche: the belief in rugged individualism versus the call to collective duty. During the Great Depression, civics textbooks claimed the trait most admired by teenagers was self-sacrifice: people surrendering their own needs to the larger good. Crime stories and gangster films often feature individuals who climb the crooked rungs of the ladder to success and are punished for their acquisitiveness,
Longtime KSAS English professor made deconstruction more widely accessible
Image caption: J. Hillis Miller
Credit: JEREMY MARYOTT Feb 23, 2021
J. Hillis Miller, among the most distinguished literary critics and theorists and a 19-year professor in the Krieger School s Department of English, died February 7 at his home in Sedgwick, Maine. He was 92.
Part of the Yale School of the literary deconstruction movement, Miller helped revolutionize the study of literature. In dozens of books, he shaped ideas about rhetoric and fiction, literature and ethics, and the ways that texts can and cannot say what they mean.
Critics of deconstruction which held that words and texts only have meaning in relation to other words and texts worried about the implications of the premise that texts had no inherent meaning. In contrast, Miller maintained that rather than stripping texts of purpose, the interpretation freed readers to experience all possible meanings, making literature a place of joy.
In Memoriam: Professor J. Hillis Miller yale.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yale.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.