TY - JOUR
AU - Armstrong, Isobel
AB - Journal of Victorian Culture Vol. 16, No. 1, April 2011, 138–162 REVIEWS The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Andrew H. Miller, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008, xiv þ 260 pp., £21.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8014-4661-0 Andrew Miller’s remarkable book is a work of high seriousness and deep seriousness. His writing works through praxis and narrative rather than critique. It is what he calls ‘implicative criticism’ (p. 221). Conversational and deictic, his criticism values process and inwardness rather than conclusions that can be lifted from his text and made portable for academia. He is forging an ethical criticism, in which the attention he gives to his texts (mainly though not exclusively the realist novel) is intended to model the ethical reading it elicits from them. Miller’s large ambition is no less than to reverse – or perhaps turn aside from – the tendencies of the last thirty odd years by building this new humanist and ethical criticism and defining its rhythms and necessities. Gone is the Barthesian ‘scriptible’ text: instead of the passivity of the text at the mercy of critical writing, it is the passivity of the reader that he values. Instead of 
TI - The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
JO - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1080/13555502.2011.554688
DA - 2011-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-burdens-of-perfection-on-ethics-and-reading-in-nineteenth-century-0r68cF0SNE
SP - 138
EP - 142
VL - 16
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -