ENDORSEMENTS TO FOLLOW (due end September)
AUTHOR-APPROVED
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.
J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor, University of California at Irvine. He has published many books and essays on 19th and 20th-century literature and on literary theory. His most recent books are The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz, For Derrida, and The Medium is the Maker. Miller is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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