This book has been cancelled Blake Bailey’s new book on Philip Roth has been withdrawn by its US publisher after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against the biographer. Should the work be judged by the standards of the life? One of the most striking elements of the allegations against the celebrated literary biographer Blake Bailey was the speed and fervency of his denial. Over the course of recent weeks, Bailey, 57, whose biography of Philip Roth was published last month, has been accused of multiple acts of grooming and sexual assault. The allegations encompass a 20-year period, from the mid-1990s when Bailey started teaching an eighth-grade English class at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans, until 2015, when Valentina Rice, a publishing executive at Bloomsbury USA, claims that he raped her at the house of the
Review: A New Biography Recreates the Lost Worlds of Edward Said newrepublic.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newrepublic.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Deconstructing Jackie In an interview in the
Guardian in 2017, the celebrated rationalist Daniel Dennett declared: “I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.” If Dennett’s anathema was heard in the afterlife by Jacques Derrida, who died in 2004 renowned as the progenitor of what is commonly described as postmodernism, his shade must have smiled. Nothing is more characteristic of evangelical rationalists than the demonological discourse of fundamentalist religion. But what can “pure evil” mean for those who claim to have exorcised all traces of the supernatural in their thinking? In the same interview, Dennett describes himself, evidently without irony, as “an eternal optimist”. By what magic does he imagine unadulterated malevolence can be banished from the world? Such enemies of postmodernism beg to be deconstructed whenever they open their mout
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.