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Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman, eds. Acts of Narrative. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. xx+ 273 pp.
This collection of essays - most of them are new with a few reprinted from other contexts -is in part a Festschrift for J. Hillis Miller, who himself contributed an excerpt from a forthcoming book on speech acts in Henry James (15-30). Some of the essays are therefore commemorative, either in spirit or in subject-matter. Henry Sussman's "J. Hillis Miller and the Task of the Critic" (1-14) reviews Miller's many contributions to literary theory and criticism. Tom Cohen's "Trackings" (110-29) uses Miller's work on Proust and Faulkner to develop what the author characterizes as both an interpretation of Absalom, Absalom! and a method for interpreting other texts. Meanwhile, the final essay of the collection, Jacques Derrida's "'Le Parjure,' Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying ('abrupt breaches of syntax')" (195-234) not only reminisces about the author's thirty years of friendship with Miller, but also engages in a complex triangulation of ideas developed by Miller, Paul de Man, and Derrida himself. Examining a novel by Henri Thomas that fictionalizes aspects of de...