The CounterText interview : J. Hillis Miller

Abstract

Q: Across: this is the word that is at least as significant in the title of your book as thinking, literature, continents. Your chapters are clear enough on the different ways in which you perceive the word's invitations and challenges – and also on what is at stake in all the issues you raise there. Here we'd like to prompt you toward different concerns, possibly, that emerge from across. That's because there's ample evidence already that the ‘across’ questions that you are interested in go beyond the conceptualisation of transcontinentality. Ranjan, for instance, speaks of approaching the book as a ‘deep victim of trans-habit’ (Ghosh and Miller 2016: 3); you speak of the experience of literature having taught you that each work of literature is sui generis, thereby demanding ‘its own procedure of being read and accounted for’ (20). In both of these statements there appears to be some level of wistfulness. We are called to ‘think across’, but relating can also be singularity-effacing. Consequently, too much can be made of ‘thinking across’. The trans-habit, the inter-dynamic, can be too much of a trained reflex in criticism and thought. It affects the readiness to think through that which might assert its own unique procedure, that which needs to be accounted for without relation. Is it possible to think literature without traversals, whether of continents or otherwise? We can guess what the dangers of such thinking might be. But what might be the rewards, if any – especially at this particular moment in literary studies and in critical thought?