ABSTRACT
Paradox, contradiction and aporia rive cultural studies, which Miller defines as “saying something and doing something (political) with words.” Technology, Miller argues, has changed art and scholarship in the humanities since Benjamin’s time and he discusses the Thoreau project, computer-based research to produce a variorum edition of Henry David Thoreau, at the University of Minnesota. Miller asserts “that the people should see the artwork and the work of cultural criticism as inaugural.” The significance of language, the possibility or impossibility of linguistic clarity, the interference of words in relations between self and other, the unsatisfying nature of language in its many functions, including in underlying history and society, narrative opacity, the relation between narration and personification as speech acts, of words as doing and not knowing, all this Miller tests in terms of knowledge in his readings in the book. Miller says much ado about something, something for the chapter.
