• J.Hillis Miller, Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), xii+266 pp., £40.00 (hardback) • J.Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), xii+330 pp., £35.00 (hardback)

In his article on J.Hillis Miller for The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (1983), Donald Pease begins his critique by citing the ‘several abrupt turns [that] mark [Miller’s] critical career’, specifically ‘the New Critical dissertation at Harvard’ in the early 1950s, then ‘the years of phenomenological criticism at Johns Hopkins from 1953 to 1972, and more recently the move to deconstruction at Yale’.1 Pease goes on to suggest that, ‘[a]s if to effect a literal correlation between topoi and figures of thought,… Miller has signified his changes of mind with changes of academic affiliation.’ Since 1986, Miller has moved on from Yale to the University of California at Irvine, my own alma mater. If Pease’s suggestion carries predictive weight, then we should expect that a new Hillis Miller has been emerging in California. Could The Ethics of Reading, which he published in 1987, be the sign of this new post-deconstructive Miller?2