Literature as Conduct Speech Acts in Henry James [Paperback]

The work of a master critic writing at the peak of his powers, this magisterial book draws on speech act theory, as it originated with J. L. Austin and was further developed by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, to investigate the many dimensions of doing things with words in Jamess fiction.

Three modes of speech act occur in Jamess novels. First, Jamess writing of his fictions is performative. He puts on paper words that have the power to raise in the reader the phantoms of imaginary persons. Second, Jamess writing does things with words that do other things in their turn, including conferring on the reader responsibility for further judgment and action: for example, teaching Jamess novels or writing about them. Finally, the narrators and characters in Jamess fictions utter speech acts that are forms of doing things with words promises, declarations, excuses, denials, acts of bearing witness, lies, decisions publicly attested, and the like. The action of each work by James, he shows, is brought about by its own idiosyncratic repertoire of speech acts.

In careful readings of six major examples, The Aspern Papers, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Sense of the Past, Miller demonstrates the value of speech act theory for reading literature.
J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Irvine. One of the most recent many books is Speech Acts in Literature.

Densely argued and challenging...Miller's reading is consistently interesting, surprising, thoughtful, delightful and excellent.Miller's consideration of what we do when we read begins to make the true strangeness of that activity evident. What does it mean to say we really have just these words on the page, that nothing can answer for the text except the text? I love the way the author takes nothing for granted. What happens whena reader reads the words before her? In what sense do thesel£"