Theory Now and Then

Theory Now and Then contains the more overtly theoretical essays by J. Hillis Miller published between 1966 and 1989. These essays trace the trajectory of theory over the last thirty years in the United States: from the “Continental Shift” announced in the Yale Colloquium of 1965, through Miller’s assimilation of the work of the Geneva Critics, to the shift to that “deconstruction in America” in which Miller played a conspicuous role.

Included here are review essays on other theorists’ work: the Geneva Circle including Georges Poulet; Joseph Riddel, Edward Said, Meyer Abrams; and the critics of the “Yale School,” such as Jacques Derrida and others, Paul De Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom, with whom Miller was associated. Exemplary readings of the theorists themselves, and of texts by Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams punctuate these essays.