Reading Reading Conrad ed. by John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Reading Conrad ed. by John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe Nidesh Lawtoo Reading Conrad. Edited by John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. pp. 260. ISBN: 9780814254356. As its two-word title elegantly suggests, J. Hillis Miller’s Reading Conrad has a double focus that reflects the twofold purpose of the collection. On the one hand, this volume, carefully edited by two distinguished Conrad scholars, John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe, assembles the entirety of the articles and chapters Miller wrote on Joseph Conrad during his prolific career as one of the most influential literary critics and theorists of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Including texts written from the 1960s to the 2010s, the volume makes available illuminating, widely influential, yet not always easily traceable essays that had so far been disseminated in different books and collections, had often been anthologized, and yet, somewhat surprisingly given the depth, scope, and critical intensity of Miller’s careerlong engagement with Conrad, had never been assembled in a single volume before. As Peters and Lothe state in the foreword: “Perhaps it is the fact that Miller has been a leading figure within different trends of literary theory, especially (but not only) deconstruction, that has allowed us to overlook the significance of his contribution to Conrad studies” (xv). Reading Conrad fills a significant gap in Conrad studies, new modernist studies, and literary theory and criticism more generally. Published in the “Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series” at Ohio State University Press, it is a great fortune that the entirety of Miller’s seminal, penetrating, and deservedly canonical essays on Conrad are now finally available for new generations of students, teachers, and researchers to read and reread. The question of reading leads us to the second word in the title, which adds a doubling, performative effect to the volume. Reading Conrad, in fact, is not only of interest for what it says about Conrad’s influential narratives, but also, and equally important, for how it performs an art that is speedily disappearing [End Page 299] in an increasingly digitized age but is absolutely vital for literary studies and the humanities as a whole: namely, the art of “reading,” understood “in the strong sense, [as] an active responsible response that renders justice to a book by generating more language in its turn” (88). While Miller is indebted to what the New Critics called “close reading” and phenomenologists “hermeneutics,” he prefers to designate this performative art as “rhetorical reading.” Miller’s interest in rhetoric is not primarily understood as an art of persuasion but as a critical attention to reading linguistic tropes that do not rest on a unitary and organic conception of the work of art (New Criticism); nor is its strength guaranteed by the “reference to the words to something distinct from them” (130), say, a theoretical code of interpretation, or the referential world the text represents and thus simply imitates (hermeneutics).1 Instead, rhetorical reading pays considerable formal attention to the “words themselves in their interplay” (130), including a special focus on shifts of perspective, narrative frames, linguistic tensions and contradictions, figurative language, etymologies and, last but not least, irony—all of which, Miller convincingly demonstrates, are central to reading literature in general and to reading Conrad in particular. Reading Conrad, then, is an untimely Janus-faced book: it is as much a lesson on reading Conrad as on the importance of reading tout court. If “reading as an art”—to borrow a phrase from another master of the art of reading, or philologist, who looms larger that is often realized in Miller’s interpretations—has been “thoroughly unlearned” (Nietzsche 10),2 Reading Conrad encourages new generations of readers immersed in increasingly fast digital media to slow down a bit and learn the pleasure of this art again via the medium of Conrad’s exemplary narratives. The volume starts with a Foreword in which Lothe and Peters carefully trace the shifts of theoretical emphasis at play in Miller’s readings of Conrad over half a century. They do so by competently situating them in the larger context of Miller’s career-long engagement with...