J. Hillis Miller papers, 1930-2021, bulk 1970-2011

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Summary

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.

Extent:

73.2 Linear Feet (76 boxes) and 14 unprocessed linear feet and 11.8 GB of unprocessed digital material

Language:

Collection materials are primarily in English, with some French, Chinese, Italian, Russian, and German.

Preferred citation:

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.

Background

Scope and content:

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 Files contain manuscripts, typescript drafts, articles, notes and journals entries on these topics, including an unpublished manuscript for Miller's section of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's Survey of British Literature edited by Northrop Frye.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.

Biographical / historical:

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.

Chronology
Date	Event
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

Acquisition information:

Gifts of J. Hillis Miller, 2000, 2002, 2010, 2011, 2015. Gift of Robin and Sally Miller, 2021.

Processing information:

Processed by Alexandra M. Bisio and Sara Hrachovy, 2013-2014.

Arrangement:

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.

Rules or conventions:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Indexed terms

Subjects:: Critical theory -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- California -- Irvine
Critical theory -- Archives.
Literary critics.
Names:: University of California, Irvine -- Faculty -- Archives

Access and use

Restrictions:: 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.
Terms of access:: 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).