00128--What has Abrams to tell Hills Miller Who is a deconstructive angel.

            Abrams says that as a deconstructive angel Hillis Miller is not serious, as in Hegel's sense of the term, that is, he does not entirely and consistently commit himself to the consequences of his premises.  He is a double agent who plays the game of language by two very different sets of rules.  One of the games he  plays is that of a deconstructive critic of literary texts.  The other is the game he will play in a minute or two when he steps out of his grapho centric premises and begins to talk.  Abrams makes a prediction as to what Miller is going to do in the symposium.  He will have determinate things to say and will masterfully exploit the resources of language to express there things clearly and forcibly.  He will present things without any theoretical difficulties.  People who have read and admired his recent writings will be surprised and delighted by peculiarities of what he says.  Abrams says that before presenting his speech Miller works his speech in the form of writing.  He delivers it and then again publishes for the public.  This substitution of written from by speech will certainly make a difference.  Each of his readers will be able to reconvert the black-on-blanks back to speech, which he will hear in his mind's ear; he will perceive the words not simply as marks nor as sounds, but as already invested with meaning.

00124--What was the crucial issue raised by Hillis Miller in his review of Abram's book "National Supernaturalism"?

            Abrams agreed with Wayne Booth that pluralism is not only valid, but necessary to our understanding of literary and cultural history.  The brining  together of different points of view is the only way to achieve a vision in depth.  Abrams also said that Miller's radical statement, in his review, of the principles of what he calls deconstructive interpretation goes beyond the limits of pluralism, by making impossible anything that we would account as literary and cultural history.  But Miller considered "National Supernaturalism" as an example "in the grand tradition of modern humanistic scholarship, the tradition of Curtius, Anerbackm Lovejoy, C.S. Lewis" and made it clear that what was at stake is the validity of the premises procedures of the entire body of traditional inquiries in the human sciences.  Abrams thought that it was a matter important enough to warrant their discussion.  The  following are the essentials of the premises that he shares with traditional historians of western culture, which Miller questions.

(1)       The basic materials of history are written texts and the authors who wrote these tests exploited the possibilities and norms of their inherited language to say something determinate, and assumed that competent readers  world be able to understand what they said.

(2)       The historian for the most part interprets not only the passages that he cites mean now, but also what their writers meant when they wrote them.  His interpretation approximates what the author meant. 

(3)       The historian presents his interpretation to the public in the expectation that the expert reader's interpretation of passage will approximate his own and so confirm the "objectivity" of his interpretation.