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Miller (J. Hillis) papers
MS.C.013
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Contributing Institution:
Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries
Title: J. Hillis Miller papers
Identifier/Call Number: MS.C.013
Physical Description:
73.2 Linear Feet
(76 boxes) and 14 unprocessed linear feet and 11.8 GB of unprocessed digital material
Date (inclusive): 1930-2021
Date (bulk): 1970-2011
Abstract: This collection consists of scholarly and personal papers of J. Hillis Miller (1928-2021), literary critic and Professor of
Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. The collection best documents Miller's intellectual
life as a specialist in Victorian and Modern British and American literature, a Derridean deconstructionist, and a university
educator. Some personal material, such as family papers, photographs, and awards, are also included.
Language of Material: Collection materials are primarily in English, with some French, Chinese, Italian, Russian, and German.
Processed components of the collection are open for research. Unprocessed additions may contain restricted materials. Please
contact the Department of Special Collections and Archives in advance to request access. General correspondence, including
email, is restricted for 25 years from date of creation. This restriction may be lifted with permission from the donor. All
student and employee records are restricted for 75 years due to third party privacy issues. Boxes 66 though 72 of this collection
contain correspondence restricted for 25 years from date of creation, and boxes 76 and 77 contain letters of recommendation
restricted for 75 years.
Property rights reside with the University of California. Copyrights are retained by the creators of the records and their
heirs. For permission to reproduce or to publish, please contact the University Archivist. Any letters or other materials
authored by Jacques Derrida are under the same reproduction restrictions as materials in the Derrida papers (MS-C001).
J. Hillis Miller Papers. MS-C013. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Date accessed.
For the benefit of current and future researchers, please cite any additional information about sources consulted in this
collection, including permanent URLs, item or folder descriptions, and box/folder locations.
Gifts of J. Hillis Miller, 2000, 2002, 2010, 2011, 2015. Gift of Robin and Sally Miller, 2021.
Existence and Location of Originals
External media received, digital objects MSC013_DIG001-MSC013_DIG448.
Processed by Alexandra M. Bisio and Sara Hrachovy, 2013-2014.
J. Hillis Miller was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California,
Irvine. He was an internationally recognized scholar in the field of nineteenth and twentieth century English and American
literature and in literary theory.
Miller was born in Newport News, Virginia on March 5, 1928. He spent much of his childhood on college and university campuses
in New York as his father, J. Hillis Miller, Sr., served as both President of Keuka College and as Associate Commissioner
of Higher and Professional Education for New York State. In 1944, at the age of sixteen, Miller entered Oberlin College intending
to study physics. In his sophomore year, with encouragement from his future wife, Dorothy James, he changed his course of
study to literature.
Following his graduation from Oberlin in January of 1948, Miller entered the graduate program in English at Harvard University
receiving his Master's degree in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1952. While at Harvard, Miller studied under many prominent scholars
including Hyder Rollins, George Sherburn, Archibald MacLeish, Walter Jackson Bate, and Douglas Bush, but found himself drawn
away from traditional literary study and toward works on literary theory and criticism. His unpublished dissertation, directed
by Douglas Bush and entitled "The Symbolic Imagery of Charles Dickens," was strongly influenced by the theories of Kenneth
Burke.
In 1953, after a year as an Instructor in English at Williams College, Miller was appointed Assistant Professor of English
at Johns Hopkins University. He remained at Johns Hopkins for nineteen years, reaching the rank of Professor, serving as chair
of the department, and holding a joint appointment in the Humanities Center. In Baltimore, Miller came into contact with several
scholars who influenced his work, notably Georges Poulet and "new critic" E.R. Wasserman. It was also at the famous Hopkins
Symposium in 1966 that Miller first met Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan.
In 1972, Miller left Johns Hopkins for Yale University where he was first made Professor of English, and later Gray Professor
of Rhetoric, Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English, and Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English and Comparative Literature.
He also served as Chair of the Department of English, Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature, and Director
of the Literature Major. During this time, Miller became associated with a group of critics and theorists including Jacques
Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom. Members of this group were sometimes referred to as the "Yale School of Deconstruction."
After fourteen years at Yale, Miller left New Haven in 1986 to become Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature
at UC, Irvine. At Irvine, Miller served on the Advisory Committee of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of
California, many graduate student examination and dissertation committees, and was an active member of the School of Humanities'
Critical Theory Institute, for which he delivered the Wellek Library Lectures, "The Ethics of Reading," in 1985. Miller also
taught as a visiting professor at a number of universities, including the University of Hawaii, Harvard University, The University
of Virginia, Princeton University, the University of Washington, the University of Zurich, Emory University, Tulane University,
the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Irvine and Dartmouth Schools of Criticism and Theory, and the National Endowment
for the Humanities Summer Seminars.
Over the course of his career, Miller authored twenty-nine books, and published more than two hundred articles. He was been
a member of editorial boards for twenty-three literary journals, including
Victorian Studies,
ELH,
Studies in English Literature,
Diacritics, and
The Yale Journal of Criticism.
Miller was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships. In 1986,
he served as president of the Modern Language Association, and received the organization's lifetime achievement award in 2005.
In 1993, Miller received the Doctoris Honoris Causa at the University of Zaragoza, and in 1994, was made an honorary professor
at the University of Peking. He received the UCI Medal in 2002 and was a a member of the American Philosophical Society since
2004.
Miller died February 7, 2021 in Sedgwick, Maine. He was 92 years old.
Source: J. Hillis Miller Papers. MS-C013. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
| 1928 | Born March 5 in Newport News, VA |
| 1948 | Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa |
| B.A., Oberlin College | |
| 1949 | Fellow of the Society for Religion in Higher Education (Kent Fellow) |
| M.A., Harvard University | |
| 1950-1952 | Teaching Fellow in English, Harvard University |
| 1952 | Instructor in English, Williams College, Williamstown, MA |
| Ph.D., Harvard University | |
| 1953-1967 | Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor of English, John Hopkins University |
| 1958 | Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels |
| 1959-1960 | First Guggenheim Fellowship |
| 1963 | The Disappearance of God |
| 1963-1967 | Chairman, Humanities Group, John Hopkins University |
| 1964-1967 | Chairman, Department of English, Johns Hopkins University |
| 1965 | Poets of Reality |
| 1967 | Ward-Phillips Lecturer, Notre Dame University |
| 1967-1972 | Professor of English and Humanistic Studies, Johns Hopkins University |
| 1968 | E. Harris Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching |
| The Form of Victorian Fiction | |
| 1970 | Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire |
| 1972 | M.A. Privatim, Yale University |
| 1972-1975 | Professor of English, Yale University |
| 1973-1974 | Director of the Literature Major, Yale University |
| 1975-1976 | Gray Professor of Rhetoric, Yale University |
| 1976-1979 | Federick W. Hilles Professor of English, Yale University |
| 1979-1986 | Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Yale University |
| 1980 | Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters, University of Florida, Gainesville |
| 1980-1983 | Director of the Literature Major, Yale University |
| 1982 | Fiction and Repetition |
| 1986 | The Ethics of Reading |
| UCI Distinguished Professor, University of California at Irvine | |
| 1990 | Versions of Pygmalion |
| Victorian Subjects | |
| Tropes, Parables, Performatives | |
| Theory Now and Then | |
| Fulbright Fellow, Autonomous University of Barcelona | |
| 1991 | Hawthorne and History |
| 1991-1992 | University of California Distinguished Faculty Lectureship |
| 1992 | Ariadne's Thread |
| University of Washington Walker-Ames Visiting Professorship | |
| Illustration | |
| 1993 | Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association for Illustration |
| Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Zaragoza | |
| 1994 | Honorary Professor of Peking University |
| 2001 | Others |
| Speech Acts in Literature | |
| 2002 | On Literature |
| Receives UCI Medal | |
| 2005 | Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James |
| The J. Hillis Miller Reader | |
| 2009 | The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida, and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies |
| For Derrida | |
| 2011 | The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz |
| 2012 | Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited |
| 2021 | Died February 7, 2021 in Sedgwick, Maine |
Collection Scope and Content Summary
This collection consists of scholarly and personal papers of J. Hillis Miller (1928-2021), literary critic and Professor of
English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. The collection best documents Miller's intellectual
life as a specialist in Victorian and Modern British and American literature, a Derridean deconstructionist, and a university
educator. Some personal material, such as family papers, photographs, and awards, are also included. Miller's work primarily
focuses on the novels of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, Gerard
Manly Hopkins, and Joseph Conrad, as well as the philosophical compositions of Emmanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter
Benjamin, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Files contain manuscripts, typescript drafts, articles, notes and journals entries
on these topics, including an unpublished manuscript for Miller's section of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's Survey of British
Literature edited by Northrop Frye.
Other materials include academic and personal correspondence; documents related to Miller's membership in scholarly associations
and conferences he attended; teaching and academic administration files from Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and
UCI; material related to the 1984 controversy surrounding Paul de Man's wartime writings; biographical materials; audio and
video recordings of lectures and interviews given by Miller; as well as writings authored by members of Miller's extensive
scholarly network.
The J. Hillis Miller papers have an unprocessed digital component not yet available to researchers. The electronic content
primarily consists of drafts, correspondence, photographs, and notes. Many documents are duplicated in the analog collection
accessible in the Special Collections and Archives Reading Room.
This collection is arranged in nine series:
Series 1. Writing and publication files, circa 1933-2000s (bulk circa 1970s-1990s), 20.25 linear feet. The series is arranged
in three subseries:
- Subseries 1.1. Notes, 1933-1997
- Subseries 1.2. Articles, lectures, and reviews,1943-2008
- Subseries 1.3. Books, circa 1950s-2000s
Series 2. General correspondence,1951-2010, 12.75 linear feet. The series is arranged in three subseries:
- Subseries 2.1. Named correspondents, 1951-1997
- Subseries 2.2. Chronological correspondence, 1956-2010
- Subseries 2.3. Subject correspondence, 1972-2010
Series 3. Association and conference material, 1952-2009, 5.25 linear feet. The series is arranged in two subseries:
- Subseries 3.1. Associations, 1952-2009
- Subseries 3.2. Conferences, 1962-2006
Series 4. Teaching and academic administration files, 1960-2004, 8.75 linear feet. The series is arranged in four subseries:
- Subseries 4.1. Johns Hopkins University, 1960-1971
- Subseries 4.2. Yale University, 1970-1985
- Subseries 4.3. University of California, Irvine, 1986-2004
- Subseries 4.4. Visiting professorships, 1964-2003
Series 5. Paul de Man controversy material, 1942-1989 (bulk 1987-1989), 0.5 linear feet
Series 6. Biographical material, 1930-2002, 1.25 linear feet. The series is arranged in five subseries:
- Subseries 6.1. Biographies, curricula vitea, and personal ephemera, 1965-2002
- Subseries 6.2. Family material, 1981-1992
- Subseries 6.3. Honors and awards, 1970-2002
- Subseries 6.4. Interviews, 1979-2008
- Subseries 6.5. Photographs, 1930-2001
Series 7. Writing of others, circa 1940s-2011, 24 linear feet
Series 8. Audiovisual material, 1983-2002, 0.75 linear feet. The series is arranged in two subseries:
- Subseries 8.1 Audio cassettes, 1983-2002
- Subseries 8.2.Video cassettes, 1990-2002
Series 9. Born digital files, circa 1980s-2000s, 11.8 Gigabytes and 1.5 linear feet
The collection also contains two unprocessed additions:
- Accession 2017-019. Unprocessed addition 2015, 1965-2009. 6 linear feet.
- Accession 2021-021. Unprocessed addition 2021, 1963-2021. 8 linear feet.
The following dissertations, mostly evaluated or directed by Miller, have been removed from this collection as they are available
as published works:
Arakawa, Steven R. "The Relationship of Father and Daughter in the Novels of Charles Dickens." PhD dissertation, Yale University,
1977.
Bouse, Susan K. "Reevaluating Redundancy: The Revision of Domestic Ideology in Nineteenth Century Redundant-Woman Narratives."
PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1998.
Boyer, Patricia Estella. "The Body of Death: Medusan Transfigurations of Betweenness in Keats and Swinburne." PhD dissertation,
Yale University, 1991.
Brand, Dana. "The Spectator and the City: Fantasies of Urban Legibility in Nineteenth Century England and America." PhD dissertation,
Yale University, 1981.
Brogan, Kate. "Elizabeth Bishop: Romantic Revisionism and the Poetry of Exile." PhD dissertation, Yale University.
Buckholtz, Alexander Mark. "Rehearsing the Last Judgment: Politics, Penance, and Ritual Theatre in the Holy Roman Empire and
Swiss Confederation, c. 1400-c.1600." PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1999.
Bush, Keith Andrew. "Portals of Discovery: Maurice Blanchot—Jose Lezama Lima—Reinaldo Arenas." PhD dissertation, Yale University,
1983.
Camhi, Leslie Ellen. "Prisoners of Gender: Hysteria, Psychoanalysis and Literature in Fin-de-siecle Culture." PhD dissertation,
Yale University, 1991.
Cohen, Thomas D. "Hyperbaton: Essays in Dialogue, and the Materiality of Inscription: Plato, Bakhtin, Melville." PhD dissertation,
Yale University, 1987.
Cullis, Tara Elizabeth. "Literature of Rupture: Science and Literature in the Twentieth Century." PhD dissertation, University
of Wisconsin, 1983.
Davis, Linette Bua. "Vantage Points: The Political Service of Mimesis in Narratives of Vision." PhD dissertation, University
of California, Irvine, 1999.
Delogu, Christopher Jon. "Reading the Fantastic—Chance Encounters with Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Saussure, and Blanchot." PhD
dissertation, Yale University, 1991.
Drake, Alfred James. "'Bully Boy with No Glass Eye:'" Oscar Wilde as Socialist." PhD dissertation, University of California,
Irvine, 1997.
Drever, Tiffany Ellen. "Medical Mysteries: Dragging the Victorian Hysteric Into the Machine Age," PhD dissertation, University
of California, Irvine, 1998.
Dunkelsbuhler, Ulrike. "Kritik der Rahmen-Vernunft: Parergon-Versionen nach Kant und Derrida." PhD dissertation, 1989.
Edmundson, Mark. "Towards Reading Freud: Representations of Crisis in Keats, Wordsworth, Emerson, Whitman & Freud." PhD dissertation,
University of Virginia.
Fosso, Kurt O. "'The Living and the Dead:' Death and Community in William Wordsworth's Early Poems, 1787-1797." PhD dissertation,
University of California, Irvine, 1993.
Ginsburg, Michal Peled. "Free Indirect Discourse Theme and Narrative Voice in Flaubert, George Eliot, and Verga". PhD dissertation,
Yale University, 1977.
Giudice, Francesco. "'Letture Dell'illeggibile' Gli Yale critics." PhD dissertation, Universita Degli Studi Di Trieste, 1994-5.
Gordon, Paul H. "The Critical Double Figurative Meaning in Protagoras, James, and Rafka." PhD dissertation, Yale University,
1984.
Heacox, Thomas. "Very Dear Person, Very Dear Place: Love in the Fiction of E.M. Forster." PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins
University, 1975.
Heckleman, Ronald J. "'Promyse that is Dette:' Toward a Rhetoric and History of Literary Promising." PhD dissertation, Claremont
Graduate School, 1985.
Hensley, David Clyde. "The Philosophy of Samuel Richardson." PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1989.
Holt, Fran Browder. "Deconstruction from Derrida to Yale." PhD dissertation, Georgia State University, 1981.
Homans, Margaret Beverly. "Studies in the Feminine Poetic Imagination: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson."
PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1978.
Ingraffia, Brian D. "Taking Captive or Being Taken Captive? Heidegger, Derrida, and the De(con)struction of the Theological
Character of Metaphysics." PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine.
Kendrick, Walter Mayforth. "The Vanishing Word: Anthony Trollope, Robert Browning, and the Sensation Novel of the 1860's."
PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1975.
Klein, Scott Warren. "Opposition and Representation: The Fictions of Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce." PhD dissertation, Yale
University, 1990.
Lee, Il-Hwan. "The Drama of Desire: the Cantos of Ezra Pound." PhD dissertation, 1989.
Lee, William Lamborn. "Interpreting Insane Characters in King Lear, the Duchess of Malfi, Rasselas, Maud, and As I Lay Dying:
Toward a Theory." PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1980.
Mahar, Margaret Anne. "The Shape of a History: Eliot, Hardy, and Lawrence." PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1975.
Matrisciano, Jane Louise. "Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah: The Iconography of Revaluation." PhD dissertation, Yale University,
1977.
Maxwell, David Victor. "The Keys to the Self: Rhetorics of Self-Development in Franklin, de Man, Emerson, and Melville." PhD
dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1999.
McCausland, Elizabeth Darrow. "Circling the City: Fantasies of Order in Victorian Urban Literature." PhD dissertation, University
of California, Irvine, 1997.
Meisel, Perry Hal. "Virginia Woolf: A Poetics of Character." PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1975.
Obodiac, Erin. "Technics and the Sublime." PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2007.
Overmeer, Rene Roelof. "Wreading and Riting: Notes on the Poetry-Commentary Relationship." PhD dissertation, Universite de
Lausanne, 1991.
Owen, Wendy Emerson. "'A Riddle in Nine Syllables:" Female Creativity in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath." PhD dissertation, Yale
University, 1985.
Postlethwaite, Diana Lynn. "The Novelist as a Woman of Science: George Eliot and Contemporary Psychology." PhD dissertation,
Yale University, 1975.
Potolsky, Matthew D. "Teaching Decadence: Aestheticism and the Ends of Education in Gautier, Masoch, and Pater." PhD dissertation,
University of California, Irvine, 1997.
Pugliese, Joseph. "Hawthorne Pro Nietzsche: A Nietzschean Revaluation of the Hawthorne Romances." PhD dissertation, University
of Sydney, 1992.
Readings, W.J. "The Restoration and the Fall of Language: The Search for Meaning in the Poetry of Marvell and Milton." PhD
dissertation, Balliol College, 1985.
Riquelme, John Paul. "Modes of Consciousness in James Joyce's Ulysses." PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1977.
Romano, John Gerald. "Dickens and the Form of the Realist Novel." PhD dissertation, Yale University.
Saldívar, Ramón. "Reading and Rhetoric: Studies in the Interpretation of Modern Narrative. PhD dissertation, Yale University,
1976.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "The Coherence of Gothic Coventions." PhD dissertation, Yale University 1975.
Shusterman, Alan Jay. "Jewels Set in Iron Acting and Seeing in Joseph Conrad's Middle Fiction." PhD dissertation, The University
of Chicago, 1977.
Smirlock, Daniel. "Rough Truth: Realism and the Form of George Meredith's Fiction." PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1979.
Smith, Jeremy Mark. "Blank Verse Sympathy: Abstraction, Time, and Poetic Form in William Wordsworth's two-part Prelude." PhD
dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1998.
Spradley, Dana Lloyd. "Rewiting the Respublica: The Politics of Literary Figuration in More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Pericles,
and Milton's Aeropagitica." PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1989.
Sullivan, Mary Petrus, R.S.M., "The Descriptive Style of Joseph Conrad." PhD dissertation, The University of Notre Dame, 1964.
Thompson, David Owen. "Fiction and the Forms of Community: Strauss, Feuerbach, and George Eliot." PhD dissertation, Yale University,
1979.
Vejdovsky, Boris. "Ideas of Order: Ethics and Topos in American Literature." PhD dissertation, Universite de Lausanne, 1997.
Van Oort, Richard. "The Origin and Fuction of the Aesthetic Sign." PhD dissertation, University of California Irvine, 2002.
Venturino, Steven. "Critical Baggage: Traveling Theory in China, Tibet, and the Transnational Academy." PhD dissertation,
Loyola University Chicago, 2000.
Wihl, Gary Sheldon. "'Truth in Mosaic:' Studies in Ruskin's Modern Painters and Related Works." PhD dissertation, Yale University,
1983.
Wilkins, Peter Duncan. "Finite Nations, Finite Selves: The Failure of Apocalypse in North American Fiction." PhD dissertation,
University of California, Irvine, 1997.
Wolfs, R. "Dekonstruktieve Kritiek een onaangename vertroebeling?" PhD dissertation, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1984.
Zeigler, James. "America Studies: Political Life at the End of Ideology." PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine,
2004.
Ziemer, Gerhard Henry. "Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic, Sexual, and Moral Que(e)rying of Identity." PhD dissertation, University
of California, Irvine, 2000.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Literary critics.
Critical theory -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- California -- Irvine
Critical theory -- Archives.
University of California, Irvine -- Faculty -- Archives