D.A. Miller

D. A. Miller (born 1948) is an American literary critic and film scholar. He is John F. Hotchkis Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Education and Teaching

He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 1977 and taught comparative literature and English at UC Berkeley, Harvard University, and Columbia University before returning to UC Berkeley.

Overview of Major Works

Miller’s work has been enormously influential in a wide range of fields in literary and cultural studies, including narrative theory, the history of the novel, film studies, and gay studies.

In his early work, Miller examined the cultural and ideological work of the nineteenth-century novel in English and French. Influenced by structuralism and centered on novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Stendhal, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (1981) considered the novel form’s fraught relationship to the social and ethical principles that it purports to convey. Miller argued that these closure-promoting principles belie the openness required by traditional narrative itself, defined as both “a quest after that which will end questing” and “an interruption of what will be resumed.”

Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988) drew on the writing and teaching of Michel Foucault to consider the novel’s setting to work as a technology of discipline. “Disciplinary power,” Miller wrote, “constitutively mobilizes a tactic of tact: it is the policing power that never passes for such, but is either invisible or visible only under cover of other, nobler or simply blander intentionalities (to educate, to cure, to produce, to defend).” Miller’s book thus countered critical celebrations of the novel as inherently emancipatory. (Indeed, The Novel and the Police exposed these celebrations as “perpetuating the [novel’s] ruse.”) Against this “subversion hypothesis,” Miller called for attention to the novel’s ability effectively to produce subjects, its capacity to form “a subject habituated to psychic displacements, evacuations, reinvestments, in a social order whose totalizing power circulates all the more easily for being pulverized.”

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