D. A. Miller Quotes

D. A. Miller is an American literary critic and film scholar. He is John F. Hotchkis Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Wikipedia

✵ 22. January 1948

“Even the blandest (or bluffest) “scholarly work” fears getting into trouble: less with the adversaries whose particular attacks it keeps busy anticipating than through what, but for the spectacle of this very activity, might be perceived as an overall lack of authorization. It is as though, unless the work at once assumed its most densely professional form, it would somehow get unplugged from whatever power station (the academy, the specialization) enables it to speak. Nothing expresses—or allays—this separation anxiety better than the protocol requiring an introduction to “situate” the work within its institutional and discursive matrix. The same nervous ritual that attests a positive dread of being asocial — of failing to furnish the proper authorities with one’s papers, and vice versa — places these possibilities at an infinite remove from a writing whose thorough assimilation, courted from the start, makes it too readable to need to be read much further.”

D. A. Miller

The Novel and the Police (1988), p. vii

Fear , Business , Reading

D. A. Miller Quotes

D. A. Miller Quotes

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