Calvin College Welcomes J. Hillis Miller

Renowned literary scholar J. Hillis Miller comes to campus this fall. A prolific theorist and critic, Miller earned fame in the eighties as one of the four "Yale School" critics, a group largely responsible for introducing deconstruction to American literary studies. While at Calvin, Miller will give a lecture and hold various meetings with faculty and students.

Literature and Scripture: An "Impossible Filiation"

Thursday, October 18
7:00 p.m.
Calvin College Chapel
Free and open to the public

This lecture will discuss the relation between literature and Scripture by way of what Derrida says about “impossible filiation.” Miller will take Beloved and The Divine Comedy as examples of literature and the Abraham and Isaac story and the Mary Magdalene story at the end of Luke (recognition of the risen Christ) as examples of Scriptural stories. Miller will claim they make quite different claims on the reader's allegiance, but that Western literature, even the most secular, inherits essential things from Scripture. Miller will conclude by discussing the so-called “turn to religion” in the humanities today from the perspective of a long career that has seen fads come and go, and religion relocate in university life.  This talk will be free and open to the public.

The lecture is sponsored by the English Department, the Provost's Office, the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, and the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship.

Humanities, Vocation, Calling: A Conversation

Saturday, October 20
9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Prince Conference Center
Lunch provided
Please register in the English Department
Space is limited!

Come here what J. Hillis Miller has to say about why you should major in the humanities, the future of books, the fate of theory, and much more.

Biography

J. Hillis Miller taught for many years at the Johns Hopkins University and then at Yale University, before going to the University of California at Irvine in 1986, where is he now UCI Distinguished Research Professor. He is the author of many books and essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century English, European, and American literature, and on literary theory. Among his most recent books are Others (Princeton, 2001), Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, 2002), On Literature (Routledge, 2002), and Zero Plus One (Universitat de València: Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans, 2003). A  J. Hillis Miller Reader appeared in 2005 from Edinburgh University Press and Stanford University Press. Fordham University Press published in 2005 his Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and received the MLA Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award in 2005. He is at work on books about communities in literature and about Jacques Derrida’s late work.

For Miller's curriculum vitae, click here.