"Hillis's Charity"

J. Hillis Miller has loved well as a writer, critic, and theorist. For Hillis, one cannot read well without love—reading is a matter of love because one must submit one’s self to an uncontrollable performative force that arises when one attends to a radical recognition of difference in the text. Miller’s long career teaches us that love is the primary obligation that binds the critic to his or her work because instead of covering over a multitude of sins, and acting as a blinding or obfuscating force, love requires the critic to respond to the absolute differences and particularities of each author and work before him or her. Miller formulates love as critical practice in his 1967 essay “Literature and Religion.” In that essay Miller grapples with the very difficult problems of how one ought to read if one is a person of strong religious convictions or if the author of the text has strong religious convictions. The implications are not inconsequential: at stake is the trivializing of literary study into a diverting pastime, the use of literary criticism to
grind one’s own ideological axes, or to turn religious themes in literature into “something other than themselves.” The pursuit of religious questions as they are illuminated by literature is not inconsequential either. As Miller writes in the preface to the 2000 re-issue of The Disappearance of God, echoing Paul de Man, “religious questions are the most important.” But how, then, to read religion and literature in light …read more…

"Modernism's Religious Other"

My interest in the religious turn of literary studies lies in its ability to frame the study of modernist fiction in new ways. Recent tendencies in modernist scholarship have lead to new sites for locating modernism—for example, feminist modernism, modernism of the Thirties, modernism in non-British or American countries, and Victorian modernism. Turning to religion reveals another new modernism, but one that recalls the oldest of all ontologies. I argue that religion, traditionally seen as superceded, is the defining feature of a modernism that seeks to locate a textual resistance to certain totalizing hegemonies through modes of religious play, irony, and contingency. The religious, then, is a ghostly trace within language that cannot be addressed directly but can only be recognized by particular reading practices and understandings of authority that work to establish a universal ethics that invokes particularity. Rather than defining the religious as a particular
truth message or content, I call the religious a modality or …read more…

"The Prayers and Tears of Ignatius Loyola: Archival Effacement and Memory"

The glimmers of Loyola’s interest in memory and its use in religious practice begin
to emerge in this account. Loyola’s discovery of what later became “the Method”
of his exercises seems almost spontaneous and natural here; Loyola simply becomes “attached” to the hagiographies through reading and his meditations spring from this attachment. But at the same time there is something decidedly supernatural or artificial in the creation of Loyola’s memory system; God is presented as literally intervening and redirecting the development of his reading and meditation.The practice of inserting oneself into the Christian history recorded in the books he read inaugurates the mnemonic spirituality for which Loyola would become famous. Out of this tension between the natural and the supernatural we find the originary moment of the Spiritual Exercises and, because his creation of the Jesuit Order sprang from the spiritual life exemplified in the exercises, in a broader sense this also marks the inauguration of …read more…