Reading for our time : 'Adam Bede' and 'Middlemarch' revisited / by J. Hillis Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, J. Hillis (Joseph Hillis), 1928-2021.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eliot, George, 1819-1880. Adam Bede.

Eliot, George.

Eliot, George, 1819-1880. Middlemarch.

Physical Description:

xviii, 191 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Summary:

A masterclass in attentive reading offering brilliant insights into two of George Eliot's best-loved novels

Can reading Adam Bede and Middlemarch be at all justified, in this time of global climate change, worldwide financial meltdown, and conspicuously ineffective politicians? This book demonstrates that reading these George Eliot novels might do more than give pleasure, valuable as that is. Understanding these books may help readers come to terms with our present situation and even act to ameliorate it. To be understood and made useful today, however, Adam Bede and Middlemarch must be read slowly, closely, and carefully, with much attention to linguistic detail, especially to figures of speech. Such 'readings for our time' may be good examples of the human, social, and political utility of reading for today. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Realism Affirmed and Dismantled in Adam Bede 1

Adam Bede and Romanticism 2

Adam Bede as Paradigmatic Realist Novel 6

Challenges to the Paradigm of Realism in Adam Bede 12

Four Passages Challenging Mimetic Realism 14

What Do These Passages Really Say? 21

The Irony of Mistaken Interpretation in Adam Bede 23

Hetty Sorrel as Sophist Figure 25

Adam Bede as a Story about the Reading of Signs and as a Text to be Read 27

Repetition in Adam Bede 29

The Community Restored 32

2 Reading Middlemarch Right for Today 36

Totalization Affirmed and Undermined in Middlemarch 36

Versions of Totalization 36

Middlemarch as Pseudo-History 39

Demystification of the Connection of Narrative and History 47

Totalizing Metaphors in Middlemarch 51

Middlemarch as Fractal Pattern 56

Middlemarch as Web 57

Middlemarch as Stream 59

Minutiae in Middlemarch 59

Triumph of Metaphorical Totalization 61

The Optical Metaphor 62

Creative Seeing as the Will to Power: The Parable of the Pier-Glass 64

Human Beings as False Interpreters 68

3 Chapter Seventeen of Adam Bede: Truth-Telling Narration 70

Down with the Art of the Unreal! 74

The Language of Realism 78

Performative Undecidability 82

4 Returning to Middlemarch: Interpretation as Naming and (Mis)Reading 87

Interpretation as the Creation of Totalizing Emblems 93

Money as Metaphor 96

The Boomerang Effect of the Monetary Metaphor 106

Money as Universal Measure 111

The Uses of Art 114

Conclusions About Metaphor 117

O Aristotle! 119

The Roar on the Other Side of Silence 128

The Ruin of Totalization in a Cascade of Misreadings: A Summary Description of the Ground Gained So Far 134

Form as Repetition in Unlikeness 138

A Finale in Which Nothing is Final 145

Dorothea's Limitless "Yes" 150

Dorothea as Ariadne 154

George Eliot's Life and Work as an Uneven Tissue of Ungrounded Repetitions 159.

ISBN:

9780748646692

0748646698

9780748647286

0748647287

OCLC:

766317595