KU News Release

Literary critic to deliver Gunn Memorial Lecture on March 29 at KU

LAWRENCE — J. Hillis Miller, a distinguished literary critic and theorist, will give the 2007 Gunn Memorial Lecture at the University of Kansas.

The event takes place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 29, in Alderson Auditorium at the Kansas Union. His lecture is titled “A Defense of Literary Study in a Time of Globalization." It is free and open to the public.

Miller is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California-Irvine and the author of numerous books on 19th and 20th century English, European and American literature and literary theory. Some of his book include “The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers,” “Speech Acts in Literature,” “Others,” “On Literature” and “The J. Hillis Miller Reader.”

“Miller is a major force in contemporary literary studies since he was a central figure in moving American criticism toward the absorption of European literary theory and thought,” said William J. Harris, KU associate professor of English. “He, among others, taught us about such movements as phenomenology, deconstruction and post-structuralism.”

Miller is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society and has received the Modern Language Association’s Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award.

Miller lives on Deer Isle, Maine, from April through November, and in Sedgwick, Maine, the rest of the year when not lecturing.

“I teach a mini-seminar for the Critical Theory Emphasis at UCI for one week in May each year,” he said. “I hike in the Maine Hundred Mile Wilderness with my oldest daughter when we can and sail ‘Typhoon,’ a 19-foot Cape Dory sloop, on Penobscot Bay when the ice goes out.”

The lecture is sponsored by KU’s Department of English.

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