J. Hillis Miller

How To (Un)Globe the Earth in Four Easy Lessons

And fast by hanging in a golden Chain This pendant world, in bigness as a Starr Of smallest magnitude close by the Moon. Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge, Accurst, and in a cursed hour he hies. . . . . . . [Satan] toward the coast of Earth beneath, Down from th’Ecliptic, sped with hop’d success, Throws his steep flight in many an Aerie wheele, Nor staid, till on Niphates top he lights. —John Milton, Paradise Lost, II: 1051-1055; III: 739-742 (Milton 195, 209)

Comes the Revolution

‘Theory’, in the various ways it is written about and taught, is often, so it seems, a separate, self-sustaining set of practices. In the author’s view, however, theory is of no use except as ancillary to ‘reading’. Theory’s function is to serve as a handmaiden to concrete acts of reading texts or of interpreting works in other media. Theory-based readings may help those artefacts be constructively effective in the personal and social life of those who read a poem or play a video game. It should not be forgotten, however, that theory (often, but by no means always, in the form of unconscious presuppositions) guides reading. Seek and ye shall find.

Interlude as Anastomosis in Die Wahlverwandtschaften

The issue of translation, carrying over, transference, displacement, or BiId in the double sense of representation in another medium and metaphorical transposition, is present everywhere in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. It is not too much to say that the novel is not only difficult to translate but that it is about translation, in the broad sense of that term. In this sense the novel contains its own oblique commentary, before the fact, on the problems that will be encountered in translating it or commenting on it, that is, in creating a new text in a different fanguage that will be grafted on the original and draw its life from that original, while being as different from it as a grafted tree is from the rootstock on which it grows. The rhetorical name for this interpolation of a graft is anastomosis, the insertion of one word within another word, as in underdarkneath, the example Joyce gives in Ulysses. An anastomosis, more broadly, is the insertion of one organ or vessel within another, or their connection by a tube, channel, or canal, as in Joyces example of the navel cord or telephone line connecting us to Eden by a number combining zeroes and the straight lines of A or 1: AAOOl.