Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature

Abstract

This book brings together essays by J. Hillis Miller on eight major 20th-century authors: Lawrence, Kafka, Stevens, Williams, Woolf, Hardy Conrad, and James. For all their evident differences, these essays, from early to late, explore a single intuition about literature. The formulation of this emerges with increasing clarity. The intuition may be framed by three words: trope, parable, performative. Each essay here attempts to formulate what it is in a given case that the reader performatively enters by the way of parabolic trope.

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