Finding Your Own Detours as a Means for
Good Reading: Good Read Hunting
Colleen M . Kropp
Temple University
Eamonn Dunne. Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis
Miller. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2013. ix, 139 pp. $80.00 cloth.
$24.95 paper.
Eamonn Dunne's Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis
Miller identifies “good" reading with the work of Miller, whose readingpractices model
methods by which literary criticism can become more valuable.
Keywords: J. Hillis Miller / deconstruction / theory / double bind
hinking about reading. Writing about reading. Not just any reading, though.
Eamonn Dunne primarily concerns himself with the practice of good read­
ing through a reappraisal of one of literary scholarship’s best known read­
ers, J. Hillis Miller. Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis
Miller not only reads Miller reading, but also includes Dunne’s own reading of
texts. Dunne executes what he attempts to enable his readers to do: he defines the
close reading tools Miller uses and shows us how to use them. This double move
of reading and application earns praise from Miller himself, who, in a Preface to
Dunne’s book, lauds Dunne for putting together “the best introduction I know
to my work” (ix).
Miller locates his pleasure in the moments when Dunne, while discussing
Miller’s readings, “brilliantly goes beyond what I have said [. . .] what greater
T
C olleen M. K ropp (colleen.kropp@gmail.com) is a literature PhD student at Temple
University. She specializes in law and literature and her dissertation focuses on the
relationship between Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and English/Scottish legal
systems within the history of the British novel. She is the first recipient of the Laura S.
Dabundo Graduate Award, granted for her work on eighteenth and nineteenth century
British literature.
Journal of Modern LiteratureW .^, No. 3 • Copyright © T he Trustees of Indiana University • DOI 10.2979/jmodelite.39.3.08
Finding Your Own Detours as a Means for Good Reading
115
success can a critic have than to instigate her or his readers to go forth and do
likewise/otherwise” (xiv). Dunne’s exposition of Miller is organized according to
topics presented in alphabetical order. Miller’s introduction to Dunne predicts
and mimics Dunne’s alphabetical structure. It lists the four primary features of
Dunne’s text as A for Acute, B for arBitrary, C for Comparison/Contrast, and D
for Diversion (ix-xiii).
Having written on Miller’s work before (J. Hillis Miller and the Possibilities
o f Reading: Literature after Deconstruction, 2010), Dunne in Reading Theory Now
engages directly with 22 of M iller’s titles that range from The Disappearance of
God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963) to Readingfor Our Time: Adam Bede
andMiddlemarch Revisited (2012). He also provides an annotated bibliography of
all of M iller’s works.
Dunne’s introduction explains that “each act of reading in this short introduc­
tory book has faced a double bind, or ‘blind’ as Miller might have it: read Miller or
read then reread M iller” (xvii). The double bind is not debilitating. It is linked to
a process whereby literary texts and literary criticism move a reader to adapt criti­
cal and strategic reading practices beyond the reader’s own. Thus, Dunne offers a
definition of “good reading” as an activity that “teaches one to unlearn one’s habits
of reading, to see again, anew, even in the texts we feel we know” (xxiv-xxv).
W here to begin a practice of “good reading”? “B” for Dunne represents the
problematic term “beginnings.” Dunne invokes M iller’s Reading Narrative (1999)
in order to emphasize what Miller has called the “impossibility of getting started”
(R N 58). The impossibility drives Dunne’s Milleresque reading of Flann O ’Brien’s
A t Swim-Two-Birds. Dunne argues that while O ’Brien emphasizes the importance
of “really thinking about them [beginnings] [...] he begins to express the notion
of the beginning as always already a plurality of other moments not present to
themselves, of endings, of memories, of trajectories, of interrelationships and
intertextualities, of temporal and spatial issues” (6).
Dunne presents us with, in Miller’s light, another double bind of reading.
Miller believes that, as we read literature, it is both “natural and necessary” (72)
that we approach the story with a child-like wonder and naivete. However, the
child-like approach must also redouble the interpretive activity of the slow, criti­
cal, and experienced reader. Such a double bind of reading generates an “aporetic
experience” (75); this aporia is “the law that says in order to read literature cor­
rectly you must be able to read as a naive and an experienced reader at once. This
kind of reading is impossible but exists as a demand made by any novel we may
choose to read” (73; original emphasis). Miller’s formulation is illustrated in
Dunne’s reading of a passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, in which Dunne
exposes the dangers as well as the necessity of naive reading. W hile we must be
taken in by Humbert, we are also asked to remain critical: “The journey Lolita
takes [. . .] is also describing the journey the reader of the novel takes from the
real world to umber Humberland. It [Lolita] makes it easy for the reader to read
naively; it encourages it. But it also makes us stop short at various intervals, by tell­
ing us that the naive reading is abhorrent” (76). The aporetic experience requiring
116
Journal o f Modern Literature Volume 39, Number 3
both a naive and an experienced reader creates a “virtual reality,” “disturbingly
likeable” in the way that it “[invites] its readers to read both ways impossibly” (77).
Continually reaching towards this impossible way of reading is what keeps the
process of re-reading an unending task.
Because Dunne follows M iller in thinking that a single critical perspective,
no less than a single reading of a text, is not “good,” Dunne supplements his ABC
of Miller with an afterword by Julian Wolfreys. Wolfreys reminds us that “there
is no ‘last word’ in good reading, . . . in our ending is our beginning . . . ABCing
us on to the limits of our reading but not reading as such” (100). Miller’s latest
book, Readingfor Our Time, in what Wolfreys labels a critical move in “extrava­
gantly untimely fashion” (100), returns to a good reader whom he has read many
times over, George Eliot, in order to pose the question whether a return to Adam
Bede and Middlemarch is justified in our current climate. If our era is marked by
an urgency to do things that would make re-reading Eliot seem a “waste of time”
(R T xi), why bother? Wolfreys explains M iller’s answer: good reading allows one
“to run lies, illusions, half-truths through the mill of reading in order to sort the
wheat from the chaff” (102). The sorting process is not just for satisfaction in the
present moment; it gives the reader the ability to reformulate desires and expec­
tations for the future. Developing a social and personal capacity to discern what
goes unremarked in the world is why we must read.
Works Cited
Miller, J. Hillis. Readingfor Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
UP, 2012. Print. Cited as RT.
---------. Reading Narrative. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1999. Print. Cited as RN.
Copyright of Journal of Modern Literature is the property of Indiana University Press and its
content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the
copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use.