UC Irvine's J. Hillis Miller, who has been called the most significant North American literary critic of the 20th century, will receive the Modern Language Association of America's Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award this month.
Miller is only the fourth recipient of MLA's lifetime achievement award since its inception in 1996, and will accept the award Dec. 28 at the association's annual conference in Washington, D.C.
"This is a wonderful honor - and an unexpected one," said Miller, who is a Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature. "It is especially pleasant to receive an award for having done for fifty years what I most like to do, that is, teach and write about literature."
Miller is renowned for his pioneering contribution to literary criticism and theory, and is perhaps best known as one of the "Yale School" of literary critics who pioneered American "deconstruction," a term originating in France with Jacques Derrida.
"Hillis Miller is a legendary critic, teacher and mentor, but perhaps his signature achievement is his work on reading as an ethical, as much as an intellectual, act," said Karen Lawrence, Miller's colleague in the English and comparative literature departments and dean of humanities. "He believes that reading literature can make us responsive toward, and responsible for, one another - in other words, that literature makes something happen."
The author of dozens of books on Victorian and modern literature, including influential work on Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, Miller just this year published Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. His work draws an international audience, and his books have been translated into Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and other languages.
Two books released this year celebrate Miller's significant contributions to the field over his 50-year career: Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the Democracy to Come, and The J. Hillis Miller Reader.
After establishing himself as a professor at Johns Hopkins University and Yale University, Miller came to UCI in the mid-1980s, and is regarded as having played a significant role in helping UCI secure top national rankings for its graduate programs in critical theory, comparative literature and English. In addition to his highly-regarded scholarship, Miller is an award-winning teacher. In 1986, he served as president of MLA. He also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Previous recipients of MLA's lifetime achievement award include Maynard Mack, professor emeritus of Yale University; Carolyn Heilbrun, professor emerita of Columbia University; and A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, professor emerita of the University of Illinois, Chicago.
About the Modern Language Association: The largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities, MLA promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from across the U.S. and around the world. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association's annual convention in December.
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