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“... is an interpretation of the text, an analysis of what it says or means.’ Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, according to Culler, have turned deconstruction into a ‘methodological principle’ by which semantic ‘undecidability’ is, as Miller puts it, ‘always thematised in the text itself ...’ In other ...”

“... these studied coincidings. In the French, the cliché can be left for dead, flatly horizontal: ‘Je suis la discrétion même. Un tombeau’. But when this is resurrected as English, it becomes Irish, at once extravagant and proverbial: ‘I’m discretion itself. The wild horse’s despair.’ I suppose it is common knowledge that this gets its point from ...”

“... of self or subject. It would be dishonest not to mention that my own work (together with that of Hillis Miller) is placed ‘on the wild side’. It has vigour but not rigour. Norris sees it as playful and skirmishing, a kind of sacrificial scouting action. Its style matters, but what matter is that? Norris is half-grateful to find someone without ...”

“... but more generally on the ‘new transgressive criticism’ produced by Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said and others, not to mention any of their French influences and inspirations. These were relatively early days in the Theory Wars, and Kermode was splitting his vote in a way that was both subtle and rare. He liked transgressions but ...”

“... Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some of his opponents ...”

“... to the surface. In his preface, Geoffrey Hartman writes: Caveat lector. Derrida, de Man and Miller are certainly boa-deconstructors, merciless and consequent, though each enjoys his own style of disclosing again and again the ‘abysm’ of words. But Bloom and Hartman are barely deconstructionists. They even write against it on occasion. The reason ...”

“... Heidegger did to Nietzsche, Derrida has done to Heidegger by recovering Nietzsche’s slaphappy je-m’en foutisme, his refusal to be ‘serious’ and concentrated and Thoughtful. Nobody on our side of the Channel has as yet managed to face down the later Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein has as yet had no brave, strong, parricidal sons. But even though we have ...”

“... attributes to ‘soft’ or ‘non-rigorous’ deconstructive critics like Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, who rest content with pointing out ‘that all texts are figural’ – rhetorical or fictional – ‘through and through, whatever their self-professed logical status.’ Richard Rorty, who identifies philosophy merely as ‘a kind of ...”

“... accorded to ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing. Critics like Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller exploit this freedom to the full, deconstructing what they see as the privileged metaphysical status that literary texts have traditionally enjoyed. Up to a point, such practices might seem to square with Kermode’s line of argument: that ...”

“... vehement response was ‘Now, jump out with me, Ba!’ And of course, miraculously, she did. J. Hillis Miller plausibly speculated that part of the fascination of Miss Barrett was her very inaccessibility, ‘immured in darkness and jealously guarded’: in Browning’s imagination her liberation assumed an operatic immensity, like the prisoners ...”