Illustration

J. Hillis Miller, a literary critic known for his work in deconstruction, examines the rift that opened between deconstruction and cultural studies. He also sets out, for the first time in such detail, what cultural studies aims to do and how it goes about it. Miller presents the approach mainly as a way of placing artworks within their surrounding circumstances. He argues, however, that cultural studies is shaped by its own context, so it may be mistaken to treat artworks as simple illustrations of their era. Recent social, political and technological shifts, including electronic research tools that flatten data and can push scholars to build the very context they set out to describe, feature in his account.

To test these ideas, Miller turns to the relationship between words and images in multimedia works. Using examples from Twain, Gorey, Mallarmé, James, Ruskin, Heidegger, Dickens and Turner, he argues that in such collaborations neither text nor picture dominates, and neither simply represents a reality that already existed. He holds that the effects cultural works have on their surroundings can only be traced through careful, watchful "rhetorical" reading, and that the critic reading in this way must take on responsibility for how that reading is shaped.