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Interviews & Essays
Provocations & Revaluations
Surveying the Field
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by Jeffrey J. Williams | ns 70
Hillis Miller has been a bellwether of academic literary criticism for the past fifty years. Trained at Harvard when it was a bastion of the old historicism, he staked out the newer criticism, drawing especially on Kenneth Burke. In his first job at Johns Hopkins University, he came to embrace the phenomenological criticism inspired by Georges Poulet, writing several books that try to capture the consciousness of a writer and his or her work. Already conversant in Continental thought, he shifted allegiances to deconstructive criticism by the early 1970s, inspired by colleagues Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. Over the past two decades, he has widened his concerns to ethics, the fate of humanistic education, and the new, digital technologies, especially drawing on the later Derrida.
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Williams: I'm interested in the idea of turning points in criticism. There's this Mondrian exhibit at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. They collected about twenty Mondrian paintings, which they've put in order of date of composition in a single room. At first he looks like a second-rate impressionist, and then there's this turning point when he becomes the Mondrian we would recognize. Then there's another turning point when he turns from brownish, geometric tree-like forms to primary colors. If you look back, what do you see as the turning points?
Miller: There were fortuitous turning points when I just happened to come upon something. A lot of moments that turned out to be, or are said to be, historical turning points didn't seem that way at the time. The little book Deconstruction and Criticism [1979] you could say was a kind of a turning point, bringing together the collocation of people at Yale, the so-called Yale Mafia, but I didn't realize that I was in the middle of an historical event. So you may be present in something that in retrospect—like the Hopkins symposium—becomes a turning point, but it isn't experienced like that at the time, only later does it seem a big deal.
I remember some comic things about the Hopkins symposium, like how annoyed Lacan was that he'd been upstaged by Derrida. He was really angry. Also we witnessed before our very eyes the counter-transference of Anthony Wilden, who had translated Lacan's strange paper, and was an early American Lacanian. He kept getting up and denouncing Lacan. There was another great comic moment when Angus Fletcher spoke. He made a pretty hostile set of remarks, in not entirely good French, defending Freud, or his understanding of Freud, from Lacan. The great moment was when Lacan answered. Whenever Lacan spoke in English he did it very badly. One of the things he said was, "Let him who agrees with me, rise up the finger." Lacan didn't know this American idiom. Then he said he was going to hold office hours the next day. He said, "If anyone wishes, they may come to my office at 11:00 tomorrow morning and mate with me." The other thing I remember from that conference was the smell of Gauloises. In those days you could smoke in a seminar or lecture, so the room was full of this blue smoke.
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ns 73-74 | Fall 2009/Spring 2010
 The "Feral Issue" presents work by a range of people, from those who have been doing animal studies all along to those newly exploring the field. If it has a leaning, it is to build a cultural materialist account of animals in our world. We hope that the writing here will give our readers a sense of what animal studies is and where it's going, and also add some new voices to its course.
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